Idaho Supreme Court says Separation of Church and State is up for a vote

"We just put it up to a vote and the majority has decided that all public parks must be covered in little white crosses... or else the baby Jesus will cry!"

Sometimes I'm asked, "what's with the whole 'radical' thing?" The truth is that when I was in high school, there were five Russes. There was Redhead Russ, Science Russ, Football Russ, Sophomore Russ, and me. I was part of a group called "The Radicals", therefore I was Radical Russ. And the silly Eighties nickname stuck.

The quotation marks, I always joke, are to indicate irony. I'm actually pretty mainstream, for a liberal, anyway. Only two tattoos and two piercings per ear, and neither of those is even wide enough for a toothpick to fit through. Heck, for Portland, Oregon, I'm downright centrist. I like guns, red meat, leather, fast food, football, UFC, and the sexual objectification of women who choose to be sexually objectified -- not much your average tie-dyed Portland Birkenstock liberal would agree with. So the quotes were to indicate that I'm only "radical" in the context of the deep red state I grew up in.

Perhaps that explains part of my fascination with Princess Barbie Talibania, the resident wingnut-in-charge back in my hometown of Boise, Idaho. Pam first noticed her when she was protesting the movie Kinsey, and I've followed up on her many exploits, including her 30%-70% loss in the Boise City Council race, her fight to remove The Joy of Gay Sex from the Nampa Public Library, her lukewarm denouncement of Mel Gibson's anti-Semitic remarks (while defending The Passion of the Christ as not anti-Semitic), her protests of The Vagina Monologues presented at Boise State University, her cheerleading for Justice Scalito (she didn't utter "up or down vote" even once for Hariet Miers), her badgering a local official to say the Pledge of Allegiance, and so on, including stops on the Terri Schaivo Publicity Train, fighting the distribution of condoms to Olympic athletes in Salt Lake, and her never-ending crusade to allow the government to force women to breed.

OK, maybe another large part of it is that fake-tanned sexually-repressed hyper-religious blond virgins turn me on. They're like Rubik's Cubes, Tootsie Roll Pops, and cocaine-crazed mongooses all rolled up into one. (Don't even try to understand that one... I'm not even sure I do.)

Still, I keep a close eye on Barbie to remind myself of the culture I came from. Barbie doesn't scare me so much as the fact that she has major support and is considered a go-to resource for the Idaho mainstream media. After three years in deep blue, highly diverse Portland (a city with more colleges than the entire state of Idaho) I sometimes forget that more of America is like Boise than Boston, Berkeley, or even Beaverton.

One of the "culture war" issues that first grabbed her headlines has to do with the removal of a Ten Commandments monument in one of Boise's public parks. It had stood since the 1960s and honestly, as a lifelong Boise resident, I never even knew it was there.

Then came Fred Phelps, the "man" from Topeka, Kansas, who is single-handedly keeping Barbie and Idaho out of the #1 slot on the Top Ten Christian Fundametalist Hate Mongers list. He noticed that Boise was using taxpayer money to support religious scripture on public lands, so he wanted to erect a monument of his own to Matthew Shepard with some Leviticus on it, presumably not the shellfish or mixed-fiber clothing stuff. The Boise City Council, suddenly remembering that Idaho does belong to a country with a First Amendment and wanting to avoid the expense of fighting Phelpsbots in the courtroom, removed the monument and did the sensible thing of installing it on the grounds of a church.

You can imagine the rest of the story: the wingnuts get riled and theocrats get 'em focused and there's a lot of hoopin' and a-hollerin' and lawsuits and eventually a sensible Supreme Court gits all activist-judgy and reminds everyone there is a separation of church and state in this country. The wingnuts bleat some more about letting the will of the people decide how we should parcel out civil rights in a secular country (but never about medical marijuana or assisted suicide!) and are eventually distracted by a couple of boys kissing or a longhair burning a flag or a story of a missing white girl.

Nope. You don't know Idaho like I know Idaho.

(AgapePress) - Idaho's highest court has ruled that voters in the state's capital will be able to decide whether they want a Ten Commandments monument in a public park.

Two years ago a Ten Commandments monument was taken out of Julia Davis Park in Boise and moved to a church. Several members of the City Council said the monument violated the so-called "separation of church and state." Supporters of the monument, led by a group known as the Keep the Commandments Coalition, submitted 19,000 signatures of registered voters seeking to put the issue on the ballot, but the City Council refused the request.

A lower court sided with the Council, and that ruling was appealed. As Brandi Swindell of the Keep the Commandments Coalition says, the Idaho Supreme Court has now reversed that ruling in a 4-1 decision. Swindell says the ruling is more than a victory for just her group.

"It is vindication for the good citizens of Boise and for the state of Idaho," she says. "But more importantly, this has incredible national significance because this is a huge win for democracy, a huge win for voters' rights, [and] a huge win for religious freedom and religious liberty."

According to a press release from the Coalition, a voter referendum on the matter was all it had requested from the beginning of the controversy. The group is confident the monument poses no constitutional problem, pointing out the Decalogue can be found in four different places in the U.S. Supreme Court building.

According to Swindell, the ruling from the Idaho Supreme Court breaks new ground on a national scale.

"As far as we can tell, this is the very first voter initiative that will go to the ballot in which the people will vote on the public posting of the Ten Commandments," she says -- adding that the group's success has attracted others' attention. "I've already been in discussions with national leaders in Washington, DC, and we are strategizing on how what we have done in Boise, Idaho, can be implemented in cities and communities around the nation."

She says the Coalition is hopeful other cities will follow their lead and hold similar initiatives. The Boise initiative should be on the November ballot.

A 4-1 Supreme Court decision saying that the majority should decide whether Christian scripture is placed in a public park! Well, not exactly. The legal minutiae involve whether the City Council ignoring a public petition is OK because the Council's act was an administrative matter not subject to initiative (as Justice Trout dissented... yes, Idaho has a Justice Trout), or whether the Council must allow any crazy-assed initiative on the ballot, which can then be struck down or ignored later (as the majority concurred). So get ready for the great Ten Commandments vote in Boise, which will generate tons of media attention, which will mobilize conservative voters, then it will probably win in a landslide, and then it will then be challenged by the ACLU and a dozen other groups, which will cause the courts to issue a stay on implementing the law, which will keep the media spotlight going, and then it will rise to the US Supreme Court, which will then strike down the law, and then the wingnuts go even wingnuttier about "activist judges", and there's a huge religious voter turnout in '08 as other cities and states craft more wingnut legislation to challenge the "black robed rulers"... and God... and the Bible...

And that's the optimistic scenario. It doesn't matter that the Supreme Court's deicision hinged on technical issues. In the 21st century, my old hometown is voting on funding the display of Judeo Christian scripture in the public square. Am I too "radical" for thinking that's un-American?