Lawmakers trip over line between pandering and insulting

I USUALLY ignore the displays of religiosity the Legislature feels compelled to engage in from time to time. They generally don’t offend me, but neither do they excite me, because ultimately they don’t do anything, except when they trigger lawsuits the state is almost certain to lose, which I’ll get to in a moment.

But for a couple of days last week, it was impossible to ignore the official acts of religious advocacy, as election-year pandering drove lawmakers to pass the highest number of these feel-good bills that I can ever recall in such a short span. Over the course of three days:

• The House passed a Senate bill (S.638) to allow state and local governments to open their meetings with an invocation.

• The Senate passed a House bill (H.3159) to allow local governments to post the Ten Commandments as part of a display on the history of U.S. law.

• The House voted 109-0 for a Senate bill (S.1329) to create an “I Believe” license tag that features a cross superimposed on a stained-glass window. (The next day, House members also attached the new tag to another bill that creates other new license tags, just to make sure.)

And just to prove that those Christians who crave Caesar’s approval weren’t the only pander targets, the House threw a bone to the cash- and voter-rich National Rifle Association. Representatives tacked a sales tax holiday for handguns onto an unrelated Senate bill (S.1143), and passed it by the same 109-0 margin as the license tag bill. (House members also amended S.968 with their plan to let concealed-weapons permit holders leave their guns in their locked cars when they park in the State House garage.)

The gun bills are ridiculous, and need to be vetoed by the governor. The other bills are designed to do one thing and one thing only: allow legislators to go back home and brag about them.

Governing bodies can already start their meetings with public invocations — and they routinely do so. The only thing the prayer bill gives local government is the guarantee that the attorney general will defend any lawsuits that challenge the law’s constitutionality — not that anyone needed that assurance, since Attorney General Henry McMaster has been more than willing to defend governments whose invocations step outside the guidelines in this piece of legal advice disguised as law.

Governments can already display the Ten Commandments, and they’re not going to get into any legal trouble as long as they follow the guidelines laid out by the courts, which have allowed its display in the context of the development of U.S. law. The Senate added a provision ordering the attorney general to update local governments on the latest court rulings, which I’m sure Mr. McMaster would have been more than happy to provide to anyone who asked.

And people who want a cross-emblazoned “I Believe” license plate already could have ordered one from the Department of Motor Vehicles, as long as 399 other people wanted the same bumper sticker-license plate. The House version of the bill doesn’t even allow drivers to bypass the 400-applicants requirement, as these tag bills sometimes do; representatives amended it to specifically require that the plates be issued only in compliance with that rule.

The problem with both of those two last bills is that they create legal problems where they don’t currently exist.

The Legislature isn’t establishing a state religion when it allows anyone who can get 400 people to order a special new type of license tag to have one made; but there’s good reason to think the courts might say it’s doing so when it passes a special bill for the Christian tag.

Likewise, the courts have ruled that government isn’t endorsing religion when it includes the Ten Commandments in a display of other important documents in the evolution of Western jurisprudence, such as the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights. But the bill veers far beyond those parameters, thanks to Sen. Brad Hutto, who, having failed to kill the bill outright, offered an amendment to add the Lord’s Prayer to the list of historic documents that must be included in a legislatively sanctioned display. The Senate adopted it 30-12.

You don’t have to be a legal scholar to know that Christianity’s most important prayer is not a basis of our legal system — or to figure that the courts are going to suspect that the Legislature is trying to “establish” an official state religion when it tells people they need to include said prayer in such a display.

As far as I can tell, Senate President Pro Tempore Glenn McConnell was the only person who did not succumb to the urge to pander. Sen. McConnell and seven other senators placed statements in the Senate Journal spelling out their concerns about adding the prayer, but in the end, only he voted against the bill itself.

Senate Rules Chairman Larry Martin, who voted against the amendment but for the bill, conceded that adding the Lord’s Prayer was risky, but he told The Greenville News, “Some people felt like there was no way they could go back home and explain why they voted against the Lord’s Prayer.”

Clearly, he’s right. But it seems pretty easy to me to explain that, like it or not, there are certain things that our Constitution prohibits. I’d like to think that Christians don’t need to be patted on the head by condescending legislators who think we’re too stupid to understand that.

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.