For the what it's worth department. -- While we won't know about the Ten Commandments anytime soon, here how 3 feel about the Pledge.

We learned a couple of weeks ago that the Supreme Court has agreed to decide whether displays of the Ten Commandments on public property violate the Constitution's separation of church and state.

Too bad that we won't know until after the election. Much like gay rights and keeping the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, Ten Commandments displays have become a hot-button issue in the culture wars, pitting social conservatives who support such displays against the ACLU and other groups (you know, such as groups that oppose family values according to the GOP and Christian Coalition; you got it).

(For the record, posting the Ten Commandments on government property has been found to be constitutional by three circuits of the U.S. Court of Appealsin, with the federal appeals courts in another three -- including Atlanta -- having ruled that displaying the commandments in public buildings isn't permitted under most circumstances.)

But while we will learn something about displaying the Ten Commandments, we won't on the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. When the U.S. Supreme Court recently refused to rule on the merits of the constitutional challenge on the words from the nut in California, we might get a hint of things to come.

Three justices addressed the First Amendment's Establishment Clause issue. Not surprisingly, Rehnquist and Thomas found no Establishment Clause problems. But more interestingly, O'Conner concluded that the Pledge's references to God are ceremonial deism and "simply not religious in character."

I am an advocate for keeping "under God" in the Pledge, a big advocate. But isn't it interesting how the GOP et al. decide who is and who is not an activist judge (or in this case, justice).

Here, since the Philistines like this reasoning of Justice O'Conner, we know there is no way she could ever be considered to be activist justice, although I sort of think she is engaging in active reasoning, whatever in the hell active reasoning is. Innovative anyway.

Deferring again to the wisdom of the Dean, on my website I noted:

JUDICIAL ACTIVISM -- My friend Bill Shipp recently wrote that "[a]s nearly as we can tell, a 'judicially activist' jurist is one who rules against your wishes. Example: Justice Sears opined in a lawsuit brought by Gov. Sonny Perdue that the governor could not legally assume duties of the attorney general. She also once ruled in favor of a lesbian in a domestic relations case, and she voted with the majority of the court in striking down the state's sodomy law. Such activities obviously cast her as a judicial activist, according to Gov. Perdue and his allies in the anti-gay Christian Coalition."