¹See, e.g., President’s Thanksgiving Day 2004 Proclamation (Nov. 23, 2004), available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/11/20041123-4.html (all internet materials as visited June 24, 2005 and available in Clerk of Court’s case file).

²The fountainhead of this jurisprudence, Everson v. Board of Ed. of Ewing, based its dictum that “[n]either a state nor the Federal Government . . . can pass laws which . . . aid all religions,” 330 U. S., at 15, on a review of historical evidence that focused on the debate leading up to the passage of the Virginia Bill for Religious Liberty, see id., at 11–13. A prominent commentator of the time remarked (after a thorough review of the evidence himself) that it appeared the Court had been “sold . . . a bill of goods.” Corwin, The Supreme Court as National School Board, 14 Law & Contemp. Prob. 3, 16 (1949).

⁷See Scalia, Originalism: The Lesser Evil, 57 Cincinnati L. Rev. 852–853 (1989).

⁹The Court’s reflexive skepticism of the government’s asserted secular purposes is flatly inconsistent with the deferential approach taken by our previous Establishment Clause cases. We have repeated many times that, where a court undertakes the sensitive task of reviewing a government’s asserted purpose, it must take the government at its word absent compelling evidence to the contrary. See, e.g., Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U. S. 578, 586 (stating that “the Court is . . . deferential to a State’s articulation of a secular purpose,” unless that purpose is insincere or a sham); Mueller v. Allen, 463 U. S. 388, 394–395 (1983) (ascribing the Court’s disinclination to invalidate government practices under Lemon’s purpose prong to its “reluctance to attribute unconstitutional motives to the States, particularly when a plausible secular purpose for the State’s program may be discerned from the face of the statute”); see also Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 U. S. 38, 74 (O’CONNOR, J., concurring in judgment) (“the inquiry into the purpose of the legislature . . . should be deferential and limited”).

¹⁰The Court’s only response is that the inclusion of the Ten Commandments in a display about the foundations of American law reflects “a purpose to call on citizens to act in prescribed ways as a personal response to divine authority,” in a way that legislative prayer and the inclusion of a crèche in a Holiday display do not. See ante, at 30, n. 24. That might be true if the Commandments were displayed by themselves in a church, or even in someone’s home. It seems to me patently untrue—given the Decalogue’s “undeniable historical meaning” as a symbol of the religious foundations of law, see Van Orden, ante, at 11 (plurality opinion)—when they are posted in a courthouse display of historical documents. The observer would no more think himself “called upon to act” in conformance with the Commandments than he would think himself called upon to think and act like William Bradford because of the courthouse posting of the Mayflower Compact especially when he is told that the exhibit consists of documents that contributed to American law and government.

¹² Because there are interpretational differences between faiths and within faiths concerning the meaning and perhaps even the text of the Commandments, JUSTICE STEVENS maintains that any display of the text of the Ten Commandments is impermissible because it “invariably places the [government] at the center of a serious sectarian dispute.” Van Orden, ante, at 13 (dissenting opinion). I think not. The sectarian dispute regarding text, if serious, is not widely known. I doubt that most religious adherents are even aware that there are competing versions with doctrinal consequences (I certainly was not). In any event, the context of the display here could not conceivably cause the viewer to believe that the government was taking sides in a doctrinal controversy.

¹³Posted less than a month after respondents filed suit, the second displays included an excerpt from the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Kentucky Constitution, a page from the Congressional Record declaring 1983 to be the Year of the Bible and the proclamation of President Reagan stating the same, a proclamation of President Lincoln designating April 30, 1863 as a National Day of Prayer and Humiliation, an excerpt from Lincoln’s “Reply to Loyal Colored People of Baltimore upon Presentation of a Bible” stating that “[t]he Bible is the best gift God has ever given to man,” and the Mayflower Compact. 96 F. Supp. 2d 679, 684 (ED Ky., 2000). The Counties erected the displays in accordance with a resolution passed by their legislative bodies, authorizing the County-Judge Executives “to read or post the Ten Commandments as the precedent legal code upon which the civil and criminal codes of the Commonwealth of Kentucky are founded,” and to display alongside the Ten Commandments copies of the documents listed above “without censorship because of any Christian or religious references in these writings, documents, and historical records.” Def. Exh. 1 in Memorandum in Support of Defendants’ Motion to Dismiss in Civ. A. No. 99–507, p. 1 (ED Ky.) (hereinafter Def. Exh. 1).

¹⁴Contrary to the Court’s suggestion, see ante, at 24, n. 20, it is clear that the resolutions were closely tied to the second displays, but not to the third. Each of the documents included in the second displays was authorized by the resolutions, and those displays, consistent with the resolutions’ direction to “post the Ten Commandments as the precedent legal code upon which the civil and criminal codes of the Commonwealth of Kentucky are founded,” Def. Exh. 1, consisted of a large copy of the Ten Commandments alongside much smaller framed copies of other historical, religious documents. The third displays, in contrast, included documents not mentioned in the resolutions (the Magna Carta and a picture of Lady Justice) and did not include documents authorized by the resolutions (correspondence and proclamations of Abraham Lincoln and the Resolution of Congress declaring 1983 to be the Year of the Bible).The resolutions also provided that they were to be posted beside the displays that they authorized. Def. Exh. 1, at 9. Yet respondents have never suggested the resolutions were posted next to the third displays, and the record before the Court indicates that they were not. The photos included in the Appendix show that the third displays included 10 frames—the nine historical documents and the prefatory statement explaining the relevance of each of the documents. See App. to Pet. for Cert. 177a (McCreary County), 178a (Pulaski County).