The irony eluded me for too long. When the irony struck me, I wondered why I had not realized it before. And I wondered why people were arguing over legal precedence when the irony was staring them in the face, making the whole thing so ridiculous. Above, Haze brings up the issue, for several paragraphs, but doesn't even mention the irony.
For those not familiar with the Ten Commandments, one of them says: "you shall not make a graven image". Throughout the history of Christianity, this has been ignored often enough, and for various periods, the strongest symbols of religious discourse were graven, or at least painted images. However, if you are making a big deal about telling people not to engrave images, maybe a good place to start would be not to start setting up graven images.
Although some people may argue on the technicalities of it, a monument to the Ten Commandments can be every bit as much of an idol as a statue of Zeus. The Ten Commandments so solemnly set up are just another graven image, which they of course forbid. Martin Buber, a liberal but mainline Theologian, wrote a short but piercing essay where he points out that the Ten Commandments are directly from the mind of God to the conscience of Humanity. Zeus, presumably, is not real, and making a statue of him only misleads you about something that does not exist. The Ten Commandments, the idea that their is a direct moral voice speaking to people, are no more tangible than Zeus, but are very real. An attempt to turn them into a tangible reality, either through turning them into stone or political power only distracts from their reality.
Europeans have been nominally Christianized for many centuries now, but they keep on missing the point, turning the sublime into what they really worship: Blood and Soil. Here, we see a strong moral message turned into blood, in the sense that it is part of a communal heritage, and into soil in the direct way that people are developing a religious attachment to a piece of rock.
The fact that these people are still operating at this level of thought does not bode well for their future.