Ten Commandments — unconstitutional or hypocritical — what'll it be?

BOSTON — This is one of those moments when you really can blame Hollywood for the culture wars. Not the Hollywood of Michael Moore and Mel Gibson but the Hollywood of Cecil B. DeMille and Charlton Heston.

DeMille was the mogul who famously bragged: "Give me any two pages of the Bible and I'll give you a picture." Almost a half-century ago, he took a few more pages and made "The Ten Commandments."

When the epic was done, DeMille went into publicity overdrive. He funded the Fraternal Order of Eagles' promotion of Ten Commandments displays. One of the monuments landed on the grounds of the Texas capitol, where — fast forward — a homeless lawyer happened upon it and took his protest all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The tale of the Texas monument was one of two Ten Commandment cases heard Wednesday. The other was about the framed copies of the biblical Decalogue placed in some Kentucky courthouses. The Supremes will have to decide whether putting the commandments in public spaces amounts to a state endorsement of religion or whether it is merely an acknowledgment of their historic influence on the law.

In the words of Justice Antonin Scalia, "I bet that 90 percent of the American people believe in the Ten Commandments, and 85 percent couldn't tell you what they all are."

The whole Ten Commandments furor is fueled by religious conservatives and then handed to lawyers who offer a secular defense. In this case, for example, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott defended the 6-foot stone bearing the words "I am the Lord thy God" by saying it was just one presence in a "museumlike" setting filled with homages to other "historical influences." Kentucky's Matthew Staver defended the displays that were meant to illustrate "America's Christian heritage" by saying they were merely part of a historic tableau.

The historic cover story for a religious message tells you just what sort of a mess we are in. As Douglas Laycock of the University of Texas Law School says, "The court has said that the government cannot endorse religion, and the government keeps doing it anyway. Then religious groups are forced to defend it in court by saying it isn't religion at all — it's about the foundations of American law or it's a historical landmark."

This reminds me of the convoluted arguments over evolution. Old-fashioned biblical creationism is presented to courts and school committees in the secular and pseudo-scientific garb of "intelligent design."