Wait What?

Religious monuments abound

Florida isn't just about beautiful weather and beaches, it's also seen some political controversies. I know, "Who would have thought?" but it's true.

Now any state can have hanging chads and delay executions for political fundraisers, but only in Florida will you find a little known area between Jacksonville and Gainesville that is home to $30 hotel rooms, boiled peanut vendors and the Bradford County Courthouse. Starke, the county seat, is the only place to go to the bathroom on 301 which is important as much of the traffic is UF Football related and in 2013, there have been lots of people using liquid therapy to get through the games.

However, as the area is conservative (Bradford county usually goes Republican in national elections) but not super ideological (plenty of county wide Democratic office holders), one could easily imagine that Starke would keep a nice low profile nationally.

Nope!

Moses was apparently a beast

The Starke Community of Men's Fellowship funded and erected a statue of the 10 commandments in the front of the courthouse. Not surprisingly, there was some concerns about the doctrine of Church and State separation. Now for the record, the separation of Church and State is not actually a constitutional mandate. It was first addressed by the Supreme Court in 1947 but is based on the First Amendment which does state (poorly paraphrased here) that the United States Government will not endorse any particular religion. So it's pretty widely understood but certainly contentious.

But here's where things got a little bizarre. Starke resident Dan Cooney sued the county to get rid of the monument and immediately got backing from the American Atheists. In an interesting development, the Judge decided that they would not in fact tear down the monument but instead allow any other religious group to also put up privately funded monuments. The problem of course is that the American Atheists are well, atheists.

Ours is at least functional

Not to be slowed down by a technicality, the AA funded and built a bench with quotes from Thomas Jefferson and John Adams but also quotes from the Old Testament. Specifically, the biblical punishment for breaking each of the 10 commandments, most of which are death by stoning. The implication being that if we allow Christianity to influence our judicial system we should be aware of how crazy the Bible is.  "Eat that Men's Fellowship!" (not in any way an actual quote).

Seriously Atheists? 

But.... One of the basic tenets of the Christian faith is that Jesus took a major beating so that everyone is free from those brutal sacrifices. So this could be considered an indirect endorsement of Jesus Christ. But you know who doesn't believe that about Jesus, and who also has the 10 commandments in their scriptures? Our Jewish friends.

Anyone else want to join the party?

So as of this morning (when I stopped to go to the bathroom), both monuments are standing peacefully next to each other and the American Atheists have their first monument at a courthouse in the United States. All they had to do to protest the combination of Church and State was put up more religious monuments at the courthouse and inadvertently pick on a religion that was not responsible for their anxiety in the in the first place. But at least the good people of Starke now have a horribly uncomfortable bench to sit on while gazing upon the 10 commandments.