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Take two tablets: is it okay to display the ten commandments on the capitol grounds? A homeless former defense lawyer insists thou shalt not.

Article Excerpt
IF YOU'RE LOOKING FOR THE LINE THAT separates church and state, stand smack in the middle of West Fourteenth Street in Austin, halfway between Lavaca and Colorado streets. On one side, Texas attorney general Greg Abbott sits in his eighth-floor office, restating his argument that a granite monument featuring the Ten Commandments located on the grounds of the Texas Capitol is not a violation of the First Amendment prohibition against "an establishment of religion." On the other side, in the Texas State Law Library, Thomas Van Orden, a homeless former defense lawyer, sits at a corner desk constructing the opposite ease. Van Orden contends that a monument that features the words "I am the Lord thy God" and is etched with two stars of David and a Christian cross has no place on government property. [paragraph] The two men-one the state's most powerful lawyer, the other so poor that he sleeps in a tent in a wooded area of Austin by night and works by day with pens he finds on the University of Texas campus and paper that he retrieves from recycling bins--may face off against each other this spring if the U.S. Supreme Court agrees to hear Thomas Van Orden v. Rick Perry et al. If it does, it will be quite a fight. Remember the unholy uproar last summer when Alabama chief justice Roy Moore...

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