U.S. District Judge Timothy Brooks of Fayetteville is the man you want whenever these legislators of ours try to pull some unconstitutional stunt infringing on the Bill of Rights.

If you're one who thinks we don't need all these rights--that they get in the way of your having things as you personally want them--then he's not the go-to for you.

Brooks is the judge who has put all those anti-reading, anti-library laws under preliminary injunction. He thus spared your local public and school librarians from possible criminal charges if a kid gets hold of a book a legislator deems inappropriate.

On Monday, the judge made permanent his injunction against this law telling schools to post the Ten Commandments in every classroom.

You can call him a pointy-headed liberal if you want, but I call him one seriously logical rascal. His 26 pages roar with simple reason and common sense.

The state argued that the Commandments weren't religious in the way of mixing church and state, but historic as the foundation of our heritage and the laws common to our heritage.

The judge wondered, then, why the state law calls for posting the Commandments in all classrooms rather than in the relevant one, history. He wondered what the purpose was of putting this King James version of an Old Testament narrative on the walls of calculus class, or woodworking class, or French class.

You might think that calculus students could use religious help. But that would traditionally be in the form of prayer, which is not unconstitutional, by the way. A student confronted with a vexing equation on a calculus test could, and perhaps should, pray away. Prayer anywhere is legal. What's unconstitutional is organized, mandated, and school-wide participation in a publicly spoken prayer.

As Justice Hugo Black said, the union of government and religion tends to destroy government and degrade religion.

The state argued that the legislative motivation in making the law was not religious, but educational. But the judge wondered how that could be so when, elsewhere, the state defended itself by insisting that no teacher would call any attention to the posters in the classroom. What is the educational currency in a wall poster that an educator does not call any student's attention to?

And the judge noted the presence of motivation quite to the contrary--motivation evangelically Christian, in fact--in legislator pronouncements such as these in the House and Senate transcripts of debate on the bill:

One legislator argued that posting the Commandments in school would be a way to reach children who didn't normally attend church.

Another legislator argued the Commandments would teach school children "the virtues and qualities that we should all aspire to as Christians."

Another said the posting was a necessary "counterattack ... to that total secularization of Western society."

(I have a bit of personal experience on legislative motivation in religious matters. I was a young state Capitol reporter in 1981 when the creation-science law was passed. On the Sunday after passage, I had a front-page piece quoting the Senate sponsor of the bill telling me he brought the bill because of his religious beliefs. That passage, obvious though it was, proved foundational to the declaration of the law as unconstitutional. It also caused the preacher in my family's church to sermonize that very Sunday morning that a reporter of my name--"no relation, of course," he said in reference to my dad, mom and sister sitting before him--had done the devil's work by trying to tear down a fine man of God. I tell that to demonstrate that there's hardly anything new under the sun, especially in stagnant cultures.)

Here was another state argument: The school postings of the Commandments were not different from a monument of the Commandments on government grounds.

Brooks explained that people aren't coerced to go to the state Capitol grounds. Kids have to go to school (unless they can stay at home and make money for their parents through school vouchers.)

Our governor, Sarah Sanders, reacted to the judge's ruling by promising an appeal, saying, "In Arkansas, we do in fact believe that murder is wrong and stealing is bad," and that she looks forward to "defending our state's values," meaning on appeal.

The judge had no expressed thought on that; Sanders said it after he wrote his ode to logic. But I would say that we've managed to share the belief that murder is wrong and stealing bad for lo these many generations without the Ten Commandments posted in schools.

And I would differ with the governor in that we all share values. Those are individually internal and can vary from person to person.

What we all share are freedoms, which are externally applied by a generous state--and a logical federal judge if the state's politicians slip up.

© El Dorado News Times