Showdown at Roy’s Rock

It is not the case to discuss the legal dispute surrounding the Ten Commandments monument at the state judicial building in Alabama. Chief Justice Roy Moore’s failure to comply with the federal court order is not the real issue.

However, it is the case to address the poignant symbolism of the brutal removal of “Roy’s Rock,” as it is called. There was something about this highly publicized act that deeply wounded the American soul. And that is the principal issue.

Liberal media would like to reduce the dramatic events in Montgomery to a new Scopes trial pitting classical Southern fundamentalists against enlightened secularists.

But the matter went beyond the prayerful demonstrators that held vigil at Roy’s Rock. The assault on the Ten Commandments struck middle America head on. It wounded the sentiments of a bedrock America which is concerned about the nation’s morals. It targeted that other America that is often ignored and denied a real influence in the general life of the country.

This rock engraved with the Ten Commandments is the perfect symbol of all this other America believes.

The reason the monument elicited so much emotion and sympathy is because a huge swath of the American public still has a deep attachment to the Ten Commandments as a divine guide for their personal lives.

This sector of American public opinion has a notion that the Commandments must be followed and attaches disgrace to those who openly transgress them. In a world that has all but abandoned these Commandments, this other America reacts when they are very clearly violated.

The moral issues contained in the Decalogue are what polarizes America around abortion, pornography and homosexuality. While other “modern” nations adopt amoral and irreligious attitudes, America with its “embarrassing” moral conservatism surrounds itself in religious imagery and expects its leaders to at least mouth family values and morals.

That is not to say that America and even this other America is without sin. Sin and immorality abound here. However, the mere existence of this attachment to the Commandments is a constant call to recognize a moral law and return to it. Many could sidestep and go around Roy’s Rock in the justice building’s rotunda, but all had to acknowledge that it was there.

And this was the crux of the whole debate.

For decades, liberal America humored or ignored this other America. And many in this America simply asked to be left alone.

Things have now reached a point where this peaceful – and at times not-so-peaceful - coexistence can no longer work. A showdown is brewing.

Although the most aberrant behavior has long been practiced by liberals and tolerated by conservatives, radical liberals now clamor that all morality be expunged from law and that all acknowledgement of a Creator be censored.

There is only one obstacle: Roy’s rock.

Moralists rightly point out that the Ten Commandments succinctly summarize the tenets of natural law. Like it or not, these tenets are embedded in the laws throughout our land.

Now, liberal activists are taking it upon themselves to deprive this other America of that moral law they hold so dear. They seek to wrench morality from law and God from the public square. Christian Americans thus find themselves under brutal attack, as seen in the growing wave of court decisions striking this very core.

Middle America reeled back with horror upon hearing of a federal Appellate Court’s decision to remove “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance.

They looked with shock and disbelief at the recent Lawrence v. Texas decision granting constitutional protection to sodomy. The Supreme Court solemnly renounced the duty imposed by natural law on every government to uphold morality in striving for the common good. This decision, qualified as America's "moral 9/11," basically affirmed there is no morality, placing a harsh burden on all Americans who strive to abide by the Ten Commandments.
This liberal offensive is spurring Christian America to action.

Radical liberals had hoped to see the Rock removed from public view and stuffed in some innocuous closet. However, when an out-of-state crew wheeled away the 5,000 pound granite monument, theirs was but a pyrrhic victory.

As some have observed so well, the showdown at Roy’s Rock is not over. It has just begun.