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Mural Majority

By Callimachus | Related entries in Bad Decisions, Religion

This is odd. That’s the Pennsylvania Supreme Court up there. They’re posing in the Capitol Building courtroom in Harrisburg. The photo is printed in a brochure titled “The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania,” which is released by the court. They’re posing in front of the big mural called “The Decalogue - Hebrew Idea of Revealed Law,” depicting Moses and the Ten Commandments painted by Violet Oakley and commissioned by the state and dedicated in 1927.

But if you look, someone has blurred the words on the mural — the text of the Ten Commandments — to make them illegible.

It seems to me, if you’re going to have the mural in the court, it’s good enough to be in a picture of the court. And if you think there’s something wrong with it so that it makes you alter the photo, then perhaps you have to consider the reality as well.

Also in the court are Oakley murals depicting “Jesus teaching the Beatitudes” and “Jesus Christ and Disarmament.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 14th, 2006 and is filed under Bad Decisions, Religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “Mural Majority”

Joshua Says:
February 15th, 2006 at 9:08 am
My guess is that someone was afraid of a Michael Newdow-type getting a look at this photo, realizing the Commandments were on display in the PA Supreme Court chamber and promptly suing to have them removed (from the chamber itself, that is, not just from any reissued photo). Of course, now they just have to hope that there are no like-minded atheists in Pennsylvania who’ve found out about this courtroom display in the blogosphere.
Les Says:
February 15th, 2006 at 11:22 am
You do realize that there are plenty of church/state lawsuits that are filed by people other than Michael Newdow, right? In fact the vast majority of them are filed by Christians and/or Jews. You don’t have to be an atheist to object to the intermingling of church and state, though it does help.
Joshua Says:
February 15th, 2006 at 4:38 pm
Why yes, Les, I do realize that. But I also realize that Newdow is the poster boy for this sort of thing.
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April 14th, 2007 at 8:11 pm
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