Top US court orders removal ofTen Commandments monument

UNITED STATES Supreme Court justices overruled Chief Justice Roy Moore yesterday and directed his Ten Commandments monument be removed from its public site in the Alabama Judicial Building.

The senior associate justice, Gorman Houston, said the eight associate justices instructed the building’s manager to “take all steps necessary to comply ... as soon as practicable”. Some supporters of Judge Moore vowed to fight the move through civil disobedience.

A federal judge had ruled the monument violates the constitution’s ban on government establishment of religion and must be removed from its public place. He had set Thursday as his deadline, but Judge Moore said he would not move it.

The associate justices wrote that they are “bound by solemn oath to follow the law, whether they agree or disagree with it”.

The monument was briefly walled off from public view yesterday as US District Judge Myron Thompson’s deadline passed for the marker to be out of public sight. Then the plywood-like wall came down, displaying the monument again.

Judge Houston said the building manager may have put up the partition in order for the state to be in compliance until the associate justices made a decision.

Judge Moore’s spokesman, Tom Parker, said Judge Moore was out of town for a family funeral but decided to return to Montgomery when he learned the monument had been walled from public view.

“This is an example of what is happening in this country: the acknowledgment of God as the moral foundation of law in this nation is being hidden from us,” Judge Moore said in a statement.

But attorney Ayesha Khan, an attorney for the plaintiffs fighting to get the monument removed, said the associate justices’ decision “just shows what an extremist Roy Moore is, than all eight of the other justices are refusing to stand with him”.

Earlier, another plaintiffs’ attorney, Richard Cohen, said a motion was filed with Thompson asking that Moore be held in contempt. It was not immediately clear if the associate justices’ action would make the motion moot.

About three dozen Moore supporters, some promising peaceful civil disobedience if the monument is removed, remained outside the building, which was locked for the day to the general public. The demonstrators were angry with the associate justices’ decision.

The US Supreme Court had rejected Judge Moore’s emergency plea for a stay of the federal court order on Wednesday afternoon, declining at least for the time being to be drawn into the dispute.

Judge Moore, who installed the 5,300lb granite monument in the rotunda of the judicial building two years ago in the middle of the night, said afterward that he did not consider the case over. He had said he still planned to appeal to the Supreme Court on the merits of the case.