Everyone who spoke to me about the drama that was playing out at the Alabama Judicial Building in Montgomery last week shook their head, rolled their eyes and muttered: "Those people down there are crazy!"

They were talking about the hundreds of protesters who marched on the court house to defend the 5,000-pound granite monument of The Ten Commandments that Chief Justice Roy Moore installed in the rotunda two years ago. After a federal judge ordered him to remove the monument, Moore vowed to resist to the end. And late Friday afternoon, he was suspended with pay, as state officials made plans to remove the monument despite his defiance.

"I will never, never deny the God upon whom our laws and country depend," Moore had told his cheering fans Thursday.

As a daughter of Alabama, I'm familiar with Southerners' tendency to get theatrical in support of bad causes. As a teenager, I heard Gov. George Wallace's rhetoric when defying a federal judge's order to integrate the state's public schools. Alabama would be segregated forever, Wallace proclaimed. Later he made his symbolic stand in a University of Alabama doorway to bar entry to two black students. Moments later, however, he stepped aside, since the National Guard had also shown up.

As an old man chastened by illness and gunshot wounds, Wallace renounced his former beliefs. But they played well in Alabama in the 1960s and propelled him onto the national stage.

There were other thespians, too, like Ollie McClung, the Birmingham restaurant owner who defied the federal civil-rights law by refusing to seat blacks in his barbecue joint - even though most of his staff were black and blacks were allowed to order take-out. McClung took his case to the courts, and lost. Meanwhile, in Georgia, Lester Maddox was elected governor after handing out ax handles as a threat to any black who even thought about entering his Atlanta restaurant.

These dramas were staged as if the players were engaged in a life-and-death struggle to defend Southern civilization, which would surely collapse if anyone gave an inch. Now, of course, blacks attend the University of Alabama and are free to eat in any of the state's restaurants. The last I heard, the state was still standing.

Justice Moore has now come forward to defend the Judeo-Christian tradition from the onslaught of the federal government. Alabama is part of the Bible Belt, but Southerners practice religion as hypocritically as they once practiced racial segregation. When I was growing up respectable people went to church, and one's character was judged by how well one conformed to a strict code of behavior. Beneath this veneer of moral prudishness, however, all sorts of things went on.

Over the years I learned that Southerners consumed alcohol in greater quantities, were more violent and were more likely to commit incest than residents of other regions. Last year Alabama's murder rate was the third highest in the nation, behind Louisiana and Mississippi. The South has looser gun laws than other regions, and in recent years casino gambling has caught on in a big way.

Yet religion, so muscular when denouncing human foibles, has been timid about disturbing the status quo. In the Baptist church where I grew up, premarital sex and homosexuality were loudly denounced from the pulpit. But, when a church deacon tried to kill his wife, the other board members rebuffed her family's entreaties to kick him off. They didn't want to rock the boat.

Moore claims that, by defying the federal court, he's defending the constitutional right to practice one's religion. But his actions clearly violate the constitutional principle that the state should not support any religion. Nothing in the law bars Alabamians from practicing the religion of their choice in a sanctuary, at home or at private gatherings. This, however, is about forcing one's religion on others.

Alabama's attorney general, Moore's Supreme Court colleagues and a federal appeals panel instructed him to obey the court order. The United States Supreme Court denied him a stay. But Moore vowed to fight on, despite court-imposed fines and the option of moving the monument to a more remote location. Moore deserved to be suspended. Apart from creating a silly spectacle, he broke the law.

Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.

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