A Government Derived from God?

After banning the death penalty for minors, the U.S. Supreme Court heard argruments about whether the display of the Ten Commandments on government property is constitutional. Not much to get excited about, you might say. Well, wait until you hear what Justice Scalia [the one who also opposed the banning of death penatly for minors] had to say:

According to Scalia, the Ten Commandments constitute "a symbol that government authority comes from God…it is a profoundly religious message, but it’s shared by the vast majority of the people…It seems to me that the minority has to be tolerant of the majority’s view."

So, in other words, the U.S. Supreme Court Justice believes that the authority of the United States government is derived from God. That has all sort of interesting implications, doesn't it? At the same time, a recent poll showed that seventy-six percent of Americans support this religious display - a fact which played into the hands of Justice Antonin Scalia. Now of course, Justice Scalia is know for religious conservative views (N.Y. Times article) :

"The Lord," Mr. Scalia explained in Chicago, "repaid — did justice — through His minister, the state." This view, according to Mr. Scalia, once represented the consensus "not just of Christian or religious thought, but of secular thought regarding the powers of the state." He said, "That consensus has been upset, I think, by the emergence of democracy." And now, alarmingly, Mr. Scalia wishes to rally the devout against democracy's errors. "The reaction of people of faith to this tendency of democracy to obscure the divine authority behind government should not be resignation to it, but the resolution to combat it as effectively as possible," he said in Chicago.

Now, apparently, Justice Scalia is also a (too) good friend of... Dick Cheney. How surprising! :

Two leading Democratic senators asked Chief Justice William Rehnquist on Thursday about the propriety of a hunting trip Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia took with Vice President Dick Cheney while Cheney has a case pending before the high court.

Scalia, 68, was named to the Supreme Court in 1986 by Pt Reagan.