The American Civil Liberties Union's anti-Christianity campaign has been more frenetic than ever of late, with attorneys scouring the country for municipalities they can bully into removing Ten Commandments displays from government property.
Commissioners in Cherokee County, Ga., have a message for those lawyers: Come and get us.
On Friday, all five commissioners will gather on the steps of the county courthouse in downtown Canton, Ga., to receive a special gift from local pastors — two 14-by-18-inch stone tablets etched with the full text of the Ten Commandments. All five of those commissioners will then vote Tuesday, they have said, to make sure those stone tablets are hung in a prominent place inside the building's rotunda.
"This country was founded on freedom of religion so people of all faiths could come to our shores and worship as they saw fit," Commission Chairman Mike Byrd told CitizenLink. "Separation of church and state, as intended by our founding fathers, was to prevent government from dictating what or how we worshipped, not to tell us that we could not have symbols of our religious beliefs in public view."
Friday's tablet presentation is the main attraction of a Ten Commandments rally put together by Dan Becker, a pastor at Little River Church in the Cherokee County community of Union Hill. Becker was one of the thousands who traveled to Montgomery, Ala., in August to support Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore; after Moore was suspended for refusing to comply with a federal court order to remove a Commandments monument from the state judicial center, Becker said he was motivated into action by the refusal of Alabama's governor and attorney general to come to the chief justice's aid.
"We're trying to find statesmen in today's political environment that will stake their political career on this very important issue," Becker said. "We have a governor who will stand with us, who will interpose himself between those people that he has sworn to serve and a tyrannical judiciary, a runaway judiciary, that's legislating by fiat."
If Gov. Sonny Perdue is ultimately asked to weigh in, it would only be because a court orders the county to remove the tablets. Becker said that's not likely, because "it is not the ACLU's modus operandi to sue well-heeled, well-funded metro counties" like Cherokee. "They've picked on the outlying, rural counties who don't have the resources to fight them."
But Cherokee County, north of Atlanta, has more than just financial resources going for it. It has commissioners like Harry Johnston, who said he hopes all local and state governments nationwide take similar stands against attempts to rend even the mention of God from government.
"The federal courts have gone completely overboard on the separation-of-church-and-state-issue," Johnston told CitizenLink. "We can and should be respectful of religious minorities, but that doesn't require stamping out all reference to God. We intend to make sure our display strictly complies with Georgia law, which specifically encourages display of the Ten Commandments along with other important elements of American legal heritage."
In addition to the Ten Commandments, state statute mentions the national motto, the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution as "documents which contributed to the history of the State of Georgia." To that end, representations of those and other historically significant documents may be added to the display of Cherokee County's Commandments tablets.
Becker said the ultimate impact of such a display will be to advance truth through a torrent of politically correct lies.
"There can be no doubt of the historical impact of the moral law of God upon our laws and culture," he explained. "The is acknowledged nationally by the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court itself has four displays of the Ten Commandments, three of which are carved in stone. A visitor who enters the National Archives to view the original Constitution or Declaration of Independence must first pass a copy of the Ten Commandments.
"A document that is afforded a place in our National Archives and so prominently displayed in our Supreme Court must, by necessary inference, be acceptable for display in the lesser courts of our fair county."
TAKE ACTION/FOR MORE INFORMATION
Thank the five commissioners of Cherokee County, Ga., for their bold stand on behalf of the Ten Commandments. You can send each of them an e-mail by visiting the CitizenLink Legislative Action Center. Look under "Commissioner" and "Governing Body" in the "Office & Contact Information" section.
To learn more about Friday's rally, visit Focus on the Family's Stop Judicial Tyranny Web site.
