No Ten Commandments In the Supreme Court

I was surfing the Internet this morning and came across a blog post of Jonathan Turley's titled "Thou Shalt Not Make Demands of the Court: Litigants Ask for Delay of Oral Argument Pending Moment of Truth From the Court Over the Ten Commandments." The "demands" that he is referring to are contained in November 2008 letter I wrote to Chief Justice John Roberts. It can be found here.

The essence of the letter is that I requested the Chief Justice postpone oral arguments in Pleasant Grove City v. Summum until the Supreme Court disclosed to the public that it has known "since 1997 that a literal translation of the Hebrew on the tablet that Moses is holding on the Court's South Wall Frieze is opposite of the Ten Commandments."

I posted the following comment on Jonathan's blog:

Jonathan, thank you for blogging about my November 10, 2008 “urgent letter” to Chief Justice John Roberts. True, in the ensuing five years I have yet to receive a reply. Shame on him. But the rest of the story is this — I met Jay Sekulow the morning of oral arguments in the case of Pleasant Grove City v. Summum and asked him to translate for the Court the Hebrew on the Moses tablets on the South Wall Frieze. He informed the Court: “the words on the Court’s frieze are ‘steal,’ ‘murder,’ ‘adultery’ in Hebrew.” To which Justice Ginsburg immediately replied: “Yes.” (Transcript, page 9.) This disproves the argument Chief Justice Rehnquist made in his plurality opinion in Van Orden v. Perry (2005) that the Ten Commandments are depicted in the courtroom of the Supreme Court. Indeed, if anything, the opposite is true (due to a spoof by Adolph A. Weinman, the architect responsible for the Friezes when the Court was built in the early 1930s).

[Note: The amicus brief I filed in Pleasant Grove City v. Summun on behalf of the American Humanist Association and six other nonprofits can be found here.]