Moses will not have to appear as a witness in Salt Lake City, nor will he be asked to provide hearsay testimony about who dictated the Ten Commandments, a federal judge has decided.
U.S. District Judge Bruce Jenkins has tossed out a lawsuit challenging the placement of a Ten Commandments monument in a Pleasant Grove park, ruling that the display is more historic than religious. He based his decision, which cancels the need for a trial, in part on a 1973 ruling by the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in a similar Salt Lake City case that described the commandments as a source of law for the benefit of both the religious and the unchurched.
"No one and no religion has an exclusive claim to the icons of history. History belongs to all," Jenkins wrote in his order dismissing the suit against Pleasant Grove by the Maryland-based Society of Separationists.
"The placement and display of the monolith at issue in this case is primarily secular in purpose, as an acknowledgment of one historic source of guidance and direction, one time-honored source of standards of human conduct."
Proponents of leaving the monolith on public property applauded the decision, while a lawyer representing opponents vowed to appeal to the 10th Circuit Court. Civil rights attorney Brian Barnard, who represents the Society of Separationists, accused the pro-monument side of being dishonest and hypocritical for contending the display is secular.
"If you have religious beliefs, you should be able to stand up and say, 'These are my religious beliefs.' You shouldn't water them down so you can display them," Barnard said Tuesday.
He said winning on appeal would overturn the 1973 ruling and require the removal of the monoliths that are on public property in the states covered by the 10th Circuit -- Utah, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Oklahoma and Kansas.
But an attorney for a conservative Christian public interest law firm representing Pleasant Grove predicted that the 10th Circuit will side with the city, continuing a recent trend of courts ruling that Ten Commandments displays are not strictly religious.
"It's both and you can't deny either aspect of the Decalogue [Ten Commandments]," Francis Manion of the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) said. "Many things in our society have a religious origin but a secular application."
The Society of Separationists sued Pleasant Grove in September seeking removal of the granite Ten Commandments monument, which was donated to the Utah County city by the Fraternal Order of Eagles in 1971.
The Virginia Beach, Va.-based ACLJ, which is involved in more than a dozen monument cases around the nation, and the Thomas More Society of Ann Arbor, Mich., have been representing the municipality for free.
In a news release on the ruling, which was handed down Friday and received by lawyers this week, the chief counsel of the Thomas More Society said his organization is ready to assist other cities without charge.
"Too many communities are intimidated by fear of legal fees into removing Ten Commandments displays without even a fight," Richard Thompson said. "Pleasant Grove is proof that communities can fight the atheists and win."
Jenkins, his tongue in cheek, had only one regret about his ruling: By dismissing the lawsuit, he missed the opportunity to see the evidence produced by the Society of Separationists to prove the Ten Commandments "were personally and directly revealed by God to Moses."
The judge noted that his ruling meant statements from Moses or other witnesses to the event were no longer needed.
Barnard countered that Jenkins was going off on a tangent. "Even if you got Moses," he said, "Moses is only assuming they [the Ten Commandments] came from God."