The story of how the Ten Commandents from Roger Williams Park ended up in West Warwick.

01:00 AM EST on Sunday, December 26, 2004

BY RICHARD C. DUJARDIN
Journal Religion Writer

PROVIDENCE -- The first time Sandy Sanchez saw the granite tablets at Roger Williams Park she stopped and ran her fingers through the engraved letters.

"I was so elated," said the born-again Christian from Tiverton.

But one day last fall, Sanchez was surprised to find the Ten Commandments were gone.

In the place where the 8-foot-high monument once stood on a hill between the tennis courts and the zoo parking lot there was only an empty slab.

"My heart sank. It saddened me that it wasn't there," she said. "The first thing I thought was that this was the work of the ACLU," the American Civil Liberties Union. "But I hoped it wasn't so. I hoped the city had taken it out for repairs."

If Sanchez had stayed with her first answer, she wouldn't have been far off.

CITY LAWYERS confirmed last week that they began thinking about removing the monument, given to the city in 1963 by the Fraternal Order of Eagles, after getting a complaint from a local taxpayer, A. Gregory Frazier, a former lawyer who volunteers for the ACLU. (The Eagles, which claims to have originated the idea of a national celebration of Mother's Day, was first organized in 1898 as a group dedicated to "home, family and community.")

Frazier says he first noticed the display after moving into a house next to the park 24 years ago. Even then, he says, he thought it mixed church and state in impermissible ways. He did nothing because he doubted he'd get very far.

But a number of recent court rulings in other cities -- along with the long-running saga of an Alabama Supreme Court chief justice who lost his judgeship for refusing to remove a 5,300-pound Ten Commandments monument he had placed in his courthouse -- convinced Frazier that a case could be won after all.

"I also felt that the new administration," that of Mayor David N. Cicilline, "would take this matter more seriously than other administrations," he said. After all, he noted, former Mayor Vincent A. Cianci Jr. showed he was clearly in support of the Ten Commandments monument by rededicating it in 1980.

Frazier's initial complaint to then-Parks Supt. Nancy Derrig went to the law department and landed on the desk of Adrienne G. Southgate, who has since become the deputy city solicitor.

"There are some real debates as to how broadly the establishment clause of the First Amendment is to be interpreted," she said.

"Does the prohibition against the government's showing a religious preference mean we have to take 'In God We Trust' off our coins? Is a monument that tells people how to behave a reflection of the ethos of the Founding Fathers, or is it government sponsorship of religion?"

Southgate says that these were the kinds of questions that would have led to a protracted and costly legal battle had the city attempted to defend the monument in court.

Given the "politically sensitive" nature of the matter, she says, city lawyers were happy to find a solution that would avoid litigation and at the same time spare the city the expense of removing the monument itself.

Assistant solicitor Raymond Dettore found out that the original Eagle chapter, or aerie, was no longer in existence, but tracked down an officer of a surviving Eagle aerie in West Warwick. He told Raymond Bonenfant, the secretary, that the monument would have to be removed, and the Eagles could have it back if they so wished.

After it was brought up at the group's state convention, the Eagles accepted, and Bonenfant notified the city he'd have a crew and equipment to move it "when the weather breaks."

Bonenfant, however, found it more difficult to assemble a team, and months went by. By late summer, city officials informed him that he had better get moving on the project.

"They said they were getting some pressure from the ACLU, and that if we didn't take it out soon, they'd do it themselves," he said. "If that happened, we wouldn't get it back."

The city was indeed feeling the pressure. In August, Steven Brown, the ACLU's executive director, reminded the city that the monument was still there and needed to be moved. Feeling anxious about the delay, Southgate directed Bob McMahon, deputy parks superintendent, to cover the monument with a tarp.

However, city solicitor Joseph M. Fernandez says that when he mentioned the tarp to Mayor Cicilline during a briefing, Cicilline blocked Southgate's order, saying covering the Ten Commandments with a tarp didn't seem appropriate.

Fernandez said it was the first time the Ten Commandments display came up in their conversation, and doesn't know if the mayor knew about the plans for the monument before that day.

On Sept. 16, according to city records, the monument was picked up by the Eagles and relocated to the front of their West Warwick headquarters, at 826 Main St.

WITH THE U.S. Supreme Court set to hear oral arguments in February on two Ten Commandments cases -- involving Eagles-donated monuments in Texas and Kentucky -- did the city move too soon?

City solicitor Fernandez says no. "You have to go with the law at the time, and based on my reading, this would be a violation of the Constitution."

Of course, that was not the prevailing view back in the 1950s and 1960s when the Fraternal Order of Eagles started its campaign to bring granite Ten Commandment monuments to towns and cities across the country, drawing praise from many officials, beginning with President Harry S. Truman.

The project's history begins in 1943 in St. Cloud, Minn., where E.J. Ruegemer, a juvenile court judge, asked a young auto thief if he realized he was breaking the Ten Commandments. When the teenager replied he never heard of them, Ruegemer ordered him to learn them and live by them.

Reportedly, the youth never got into trouble again, and the episode inspired Ruegemer, a member of the Eagles, to propose that the organization send copies of the Ten Commandments to courthouses throughout the country as a way of rescuing youths from a life of crime.

At first, the Eagles rejected the proposal, concerned that since there are three different versions of the commandments it might be seen as coercive or sectarian. But that changed when a group of Protestant, Jewish and Catholic laymen produced a version acceptable to all three groups.

At the time, filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille was making The Ten Commandments. He heard about the project and called to suggest that the commandments be distributed on bronze plaques rather than paper.

The Eagles, however, in keeping with tradition, told DeMille they would have them engraved in granite.

No one knows exactly how many engraved monuments were distributed by the local aeries, but some estimates put the number at 2,000. (The original dedication at Roger Williams Park had been set for Nov. 24, 1963. Since that was two days after President John F. Kennedy's assassination, there's a question as to whether the ceremony ever took place.)

By the 1970s, civil liberties groups around the country began pressing to have many of these Eagles-sponsored displays removed from public parks and courthouses -- on the ground that they were a violation of church-state separation.

The dispute has intensified in recent years, with 24 cases involving the Ten Commandments filed in the courts since 1999. In response, the courts have sent out mixed messages.

Three federal courts have ruled certain displays unconstitutional, while four other federal courts, and a state court, have found them to be constitutional.

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to settle the matter by hearing appeals on two of the controversial cases. In Orden v. Perry, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last year that an Eagles-sponsored Ten Commandments monument that sits next to the state capitol in Austin, Texas, does not violate the First Amendment. In its explanation, the court said it had found nothing in the legislative record to suggest that Texas intended to promote religion by the display, noting as well that it was but one of 17 monuments on the capitol grounds highlighting people, ideals and events that helped to "compose Texan identity."

In McCreary County v. ACLU, however, judges in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against a display of the commandments in courthouses in McCreary and Pulaski counties in Kentucky, saying that the other documents that were also part of the display -- the Declaration of Independence and the Magna Carta -- did not convince them that the display had a primarily secular rather than a religious purpose.

IN THE LAST FEW years, there have been numerous other cases, similar to the Roger Williams Park display, where the controversies never got to the courts because city councils decided to remove the displays before ending up in court.

In some instances, cities have used creative ways to have their cake and eat it too.

Faced with a lawsuit from the ACLU, the city of Frederick, Md., moved to avoid litigation by selling the monument and the land under it to the Eagles, so it could no longer be considered public property. The Americans United for Separation of Church and State, however, calls it a "ruse" and has filed to invalidate the transaction.

On the national cases, the Bush administration and the Fraternal Order of Eagles have not remained silent.

Last month, the Bush administration filed a "friend of the court" brief arguing that the display of the Ten Commandments should be allowed because it helps to underscore that the nation's rule of law was built on the Ten Commandments.

The Eagles' two grand presidents, Sonny Crawford and Pat Lazenby, have also defended the displays along the same lines, saying their organization promoted the Ten Commandments not to "impose religion on the masses," but to recognize their role "in the very foundation of our legal system."

A USA Today/Gallup poll, taken in September, found that 77 percent of Americans disapproved of a federal court's decision to order the removal of the Ten Commandments momument from Judge Moore's courthouse in Alabama.

Locally, Sanchez, the born-again Christian from Tiverton, says she finds it troubling that Providence had the monument spirited away "in secret."

Raymond Dempsey, who works with Sanchez in producing a weekly cable TV show, Chapter and Verse, said he thinks problems arise when "religion loses its place, and government forgets that our inalienable rights come from God."

"Once the state thinks it's God, and that it is the source of our rights, we're in trouble," Dempsey said. "I wish we could have known about this before. We could have had a rousing dialogue."

THE REV. John Holt, executive minister of the Rhode Island State Council of Churches, said he had mixed feelings on the whole thing. "The Ten Commandments are part of the moral tradition of this country," he said, "but I'm also a firm believer in the separation of church and state and that the boundary needs to be protected."

"I doubt there have been a lot of juveniles running through Roger Williams Park who have been reading the Ten Commandments. I think a more effective place to instill values in our youth is in their families and in the religious communities in which they may be a part."

Rabbi Alan Flam, president of the Rhode Island Board of Rabbis and an associate university chaplain at Brown, noted that the Ten Commandments are part of the basic teaching of Judaism and Christianity -- and that it may be different from other religious displays.

"I understand that, for many, the Ten Commandments is not just a religious symbol, but a statement of the principles of justice upon which our country is founded. It celebrates the rule of law." he said.

Nonetheless, he said, "I would agree that the city took the right step on this."

Rabbi Mitchell Levine, of Providence's Congregation Beth Sholom, wonders:

"Would Roger Williams have objected to a monument of the Ten Commandments in a park bearing his name? . . . Maybe we shouldn't even have a park named after Roger Williams because he was a religious person. Where do you draw the line?"

Roger Williams, who founded Providence and obtained the charter creating Rhode Island, was an ordained minister who started the first Baptist church in America.

The Rev. Charles Berkley, pastor of the Providence Assembly of God, said he sees the removal as one more sign that the United States is no longer a Christian nation.

"It's a sign of the times," he said. "It's part of the wave of getting all those things out of the way . . . I can't say I blame the city for what they did. I think they feel they have a lot on their plate right now and didn't need another legal hassle."

EPISCOPAL BISHOP Geralyn Wolf said she thinks there needs to be a "serious public conversation" on religious symbols in public places -- not only monuments and nativity scenes, but music.

"Personally, I find the Ten Commandments edifying in terms of how we should live together as civil society," she said. "The legality obviously has to be decided by the Supreme Court, but I would like to see us honor our society's pluralism without losing some of the guideposts along the way."

Over at the Eagles hall on Main Street, West Warwick, Bonenfant said he recognizes that there are lots of strong feelings about the display, but he believes it is being seen more by people now than when it was in Roger Williams Park.

"I'm happy to have it here, to tell you the truth."