MONUMENT.CBS 01/04/05 9:45 PM-DLR   1:45
The Osgood File.  Sponsored by ________.  This is Dave Ross.  On the CBS Radio Network.
Sometimes, all it takes to separate church and state ... is a fence.
More after this from Charlie.
(SPOT)
It's been one of the perennial battlefields in the culture wars - those Ten Commandment monuments that sprout from parks and other public places all over America.  There are about 4,000 of them, planted during the 1950s and 1960s as part of a campaign by the Fraternal Order of Eagles to encourage law-abiding behavior.
Based on what we now know about the 60's ... the monuments didn't work.  Maybe the vegetation hid them.  In any case, they stood relatively unnoticed until Alabama Judge Roy Moore a few years ago moved a Ten Commandments monument right into the Alabama Supreme Court building.
That monument - and Judge Moore - have since been removed, but the incident started a spate of lawsuits, and it prompted one town to hit upon what I think is a very common sense solution, which was just upheld by a federal appeals court.
Municipal officials in La Crosse Wisconsin, facing a lawsuit over a ten commandments monument in a public park, simply took the 22-by-20-foot plot of land surrounding the monument, and sold it.  Sold it to the Fraternal Order of Eagles who'd put the monument there in 1965.
And then, both the city and the Eagles erected separate fences and put up signs to make it clear that anyone who steps up to read the monument is reading them on private land.
A lower court judge had ruled the sale was a sham.  But the appeals court said, nonsense! The two fences make the separation of church and state crystal clear.
There will of course be another appeal, but at least for now, the Ten Commandments in La Crosse are safely behind bars.  And, being etched in stone, it is highly unlikely they will attempt an escape.  
You know, I was thinking - instead of having to read them on a fenced-in piece of rock, couldn't you just publish them... maybe as part of a book or something?  It'd be WAY more convenient.
The Osgood File.  Dave Ross.  On the CBS Radio Network.
~C:\works\files\MONUMENT.CBS