In a Washington Post editorial today titled No More Justice Moore (washingtonpost.com), some unnamed journalist states:
THERE HAS BEEN little ennobling in the saga of Alabama Chief Justice Roy S. Moore -- until last week, when a unanimous judicial disciplinary court removed him from his job. Mr. Moore is a demagogue who has made a judicial career not in his performance in the courts but in his unconstitutional decoration of them. Most recently, he gained national attention when he installed a huge granite monument to the Ten Commandments in the Alabama Supreme Court building and then defied a federal court order to remove the obvious violation of the First Amendment's separation of church and state.
Obvious violation of the First Amendment? Let's look at the first amendmant:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Anyone who can understand this plain and simple sentence will also understand that there is no violation of the Constitution. No law has been established prohibiting freedom of speech or expression. Something worse has happened. Under the guise of Law and Constitutionality, Mr. Moore was removed from his post simply for excercising his Constitutional right to express his own religious beliefs! Unfortunately, the Constitution does not ban religious persecution. The spirit of the Constitution has been trampled on blatantly.
But for some reason, beyond my comprehension, the public and journalists alike are blind to the true injustice involved here: Mr. Moore's Constitutional right to freely express his own religious beliefs has gotten him removed from his post.