From today's Washington Post:

Within hours of yesterday's Supreme Court decision allowing a Ten Commandments monument on the grounds of the Texas Capitol, Christian groups announced a nationwide campaign to install similar displays in 100 cities and towns within a year.

Here's your quick guide to Commandment Legality after yesterday's rulings:

• If a display of the Ten Commandments is part of a broader display of social and historical artifacts, was deliberately designed not to favor a specific interpretation or dogma, and is not positioned so that it would make someone think the state is endorsing it, it's probably legal. As the Chief Justice said, "Simply having religious content or promoting a message consistent with a religious doctrine does not run afoul of the Establishment Clause." Yet even the conservative bloc on the Court agrees that public displays of the Commandments may not have a "primary religious purpose."
• If a religious group explicitly puts the Ten Commandments on public property for the religious purpose of "preserving the United States's Christian Heritage," then it is probably illegal. What's more, attempting to obscure the religious purpose of such a display by throwing other artifacts in, when the purpose is clearly to find some way to get the Ten Commandments displayed, is not permissible. As Justice Souter wrote, an observer viewing such a display of religious-oriented phrases from other documents "would probably suspect that the [defendant Counties in Kentucky] were simply reaching for any way to keep a religious document on the walls of courthouses constitutionally required to embody religious neutrality."

A key element is purpose. In the Texas case, an outside (mostly secular) group donated a Ten Commandments monument to the State. The State accepted it, on the record, for secular (non-religious) reasons honoring the group. The State did not attempt to place the monument prominently, nor, as the Chief Justice pointed out, was anyone offended by it for close to 40 years.

In the Kentucky case, the government of two counties mandated that the Ten Commandments be prominently displayed in a courthouse, in "high traffic" areas. The dedication ceremonies of these displays (complete with Exodus references) included local pastors and many religious sentiments. The purpose was plainly religious, and when ordered to remove it, the governments instead ordered that other documents be placed around the Ten Commandments to try to make them part of something that could, to a casual observer, perhaps appear to be secular. The purpose remained clear, though, and the display is impermissible.

When government displays religious items for the purpose of promoting that religion or the embodied religious thoughts, it violates the First Amendment's requirement that the government respect no establishment of religion. It is not "prohibiting the free exercise" of religion to mandate that nobody can do it on public property.

It's going to be pretty hard for Christian groups to convince any court that while their explicit purpose is "preserving Christian Heritage," that they want to place copies of the Commandments on public property for non-religious reasons. They've already acknowledged that their purpose is religious, and in turn, that they really don't care about the Constitution. They demand that the power of the State be used to spread their own religious message and no other, and they show no signs of agreeing that anyone else has the right to be free from their message.

Even if Commandments fans had lost both cases, these groups wouldn't stop. They can't get enough adherents for their limited, exclusive, largely-hateful message on their own, so without the government's help in imposing it on others, they know their days are numbered. Perhaps when they're finally gone, their former fans will open the New Testament again and read the parts about social justice, feeding the hungry, visiting the imprisoned, and caring for all humanity. If we're lucky, they might even flip through the book wondering where it was that Jesus talked about using government power to force the Law of Moses on everyone.

Wishful thinking, I know.