Divided, We Stand
America's long struggle to balance church and state isn't getting any easier
At the entrance to the city zoo in Tulsa, Okla., stands a marble globe inscribed with an American Indian proverb: "The earth is our mother. The sky is our father." Near the zoo's elephant exhibit is a statue of the elephant-like Hindu god Ganesh. Religious displays? Tulsa architect Dan Hicks, a devout Christian, thinks so. He has long argued that the biblical perspective also deserves a place at the zoo. He proposed adding a plaque telling part of the Genesis story to a scientific exhibit on the origins of the Earth and its creatures. After loud support from Mayor Bill LaFortune and hundreds of pro-creationist Tulsans, the park and recreation board agreed to the display in June. But the board reversed itself a month later, bowing, its members said, to public pressure and to their own careful re-examination of the matter. "I don't believe religious scriptures belong in a zoo," says Dale McNamara, the sole board member to consistently oppose the plaque. In her view, the Hindu statue and similar items are consistent with the zoo's ongoing effort to explore the cultural significance of animals, while putting the Genesis story in the origins exhibit seems to have a specifically religious intent.
The Tulsa park board is not alone these days in having to draw such fine distinctions between permissible and impermissible expressions of religious belief in public institutions. Consider what the Supreme Court did at the end of its past term. In McCreary County v. American Civil Liberties Union of Ky., the court ruled by a 5-to-4 vote that two courthouses in Kentucky could not display framed copies of the Ten Commandments on their walls, while a 5-to-4 majority decided in Van Orden v. Perry that it was constitutional for a 6-foot monument inscribed with those same Ten Commandments to remain standing on the capitol grounds in Austin.
The hair that was split in reaching these two decisions was fine indeed. In the Texas ruling, the majority reasoned that the monument could stay because it had been around for a relatively long time (since 1961) and was surrounded by nonreligious educational and historical symbols. The Kentucky displays failed that educational and historical test. Put up in 1999, they, too, were surrounded by secular documents--including the Magna Carta--but those had been added after a federal judge ordered the Ten Commandments to be taken down. The belated effort clearly failed to sway the majority of the nation's highest court.
If the Supreme Court decisions seemed to offer something to both sides of America's secular-religious divide, no one sounds mollified. The Texas ruling is a boost to the religious right's efforts to "put religious symbols everywhere in the public realm," says Paul Kurtz, founder and chairman of the Council for Secular Humanism. Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, a Washington-based Christian think tank, is equally disappointed. He charges that the two decisions mean "that you can have monuments only as long as you detach them from their religious meaning," which in his view is tantamount to "sandblasting the [nation's] Judeo-Christian heritage." Little surprise then that activists are gearing up for a fight over whether John G. Roberts, a conservative Roman Catholic, should fill Sandra Day O'Connor's seat on the Supreme Court.
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