Ten Commandments battle: ACLU versus small Florida county

We read:

"Residents in thinly populated Dixie County on Florida’s Gulf Coast are battling the American Civil Liberties Union over a Ten Commandments monument at their county courthouse.

The ACLU of Florida has sued on behalf of an anonymous non-county resident who wants to remove the five-foot tall, six-ton monument, which was paid for and is being maintained by a local businessman.

Howard Simon, executive director of the ACLU of Florida, says Dixie County commissioners violated the First Amendment when they allowed the monument’s placement outside the courthouse. The case, he said, “is about the Dixie County Commission essentially endorsing a sacred religious document on a monument on the steps of the county courthouse with nothing else around it.”

Horatio Mihet, an attorney for Liberty Counsel, a religious liberty law firm defending Dixie County, counters that the county did not endorse the Ten Commandments, but simply created a forum in which residents could exercise their First Amendment free speech rights.

He charges that the ACLU is not defending constitutional liberties, but is silencing free expression. "Instead of promoting free speech, instead of trying to have as inclusive a forum as possible, what the ACLU is trying to do is come down and squelch, censor, speech that they don’t agree with,” said Mihet.

A federal judge sided with the ACLU in July and ordered the monument removed. Dixie County appealed and the monument remains in place pending the outcome.

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