An Alabama politician wants to build a monument to the Ten Commandments at a county courthouse, arguing that the religious text deserves a memorial for historical reasons and denounced the proposal has anything to do with religion, ThinkProgress reported on Monday.
Tim Guffey, a Republican county commissioner in Jackson County, said he would like to erect a monument to important documents in history at a courthouse in Scottsboro. The plan for the monument would feature the Bible's Ten Commandments beside recreations of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
"It's the Constitution, the Ten Commandments and the Declaration of Independence. I feel like that's what this country was founded on. These documents helped America become the greatest country in the history," Guffey told AL.com.
He insisted the Ten Commandments is for historical reasons only, and the influence of the text can't be separated from the writings of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
Bills have been introduced into the Alabama Legislature in recent years trying to establish an amendment to the state Constitution that would allow the display of the Ten Commandments on state-owned property.
The way the Constitution is written is unable to be explained without inclusion of the Ten Commandments, according to Guffey.
"I'm using it in the context of this is historical. I'm not doing it to push religion at all. But I don't see how I could do the other two and not do that one and be truthful about it," he told AL.com.
The election and presidency of Barack Obama caused Guffey to begin studying the Constitution closely.
"The Constitution gave us the three branches of government and without it, we'd have a dictatorship," he said. "If you look at the current administration, it's more important now than ever to show people what the intent was in the Constitution, what's in the Constitution. We're trying to get people to start thinking again," he said, according to AL.com.
