More Shamless Pandering

In Kentucky, the incumbent Republican governor is trailing in the polls by more than ten points.

Is it a coincidence, then, that the day before the election (which is today) he should have ordered that a display of the Ten Commandments be erected within the state capitol building? Seriously, isn’t pandering for votes at this level insultingly obvious?

According to the article, the Ten C’s are going up alongside the Magna Charta, the Mayflower Compact, and a variety of other “great historical laws.” Many reason that this somehow diminishes the religious element of the Decalogue and therefore makes the display Constitutional, since the Supreme Court used that reasoning to justify its own artwork, which includes Moses and the Ten C’s. I might be wiling to go along with that logic if the words on the tablets are not clearly discernable — because the First Commandment is not something that the government should be telling people, and if the contents of that Commandment are only referred to in an most oblique fashion (for instance, with a single Roman numeral or Hebrew character) then the message of the sculpture is likely to be more focused on the act of Moses serving as a lawgiver rather than the explicitly religious content of the law itself.

But I’d really prefer it if courts weren’t asked to make those kinds of artistic judgments at all. Judges are no more art critics than they are engineers or doctors, and it seems silly indeed to have to rely upon experts to interpret art and weigh their competing — and in the case of art, highly subjective — evaluations of such things. It’s also slightly disgraceful to see the kind of intellectual convolutions that backers of government-funded displays of religion will go to in order to dodge the obvious conclusion that they are using public money and public prestige to support a religion. I continue to be irritated that the Supreme Court felt it necessary to be led down that intellectual rabbit hole rather than commission a new frieze and give the old one to the Smithsonian.

Maybe I’m just upset because no one is pandering to me for my vote.