Good news, bad news. (Church and State).

Let's start with the good news. On November 18, 2002, U.S. district judge Myron Thompson ruled unconstitutional Alabama chief justice Roy Moore's placement of a 5,300 pound granite Ten Commandments monument in the rotunda of the state's judicial building. Moore was given thirty days to remove it.

Moore, a long-time promoter of religious right interests, had the nearly three-ton monument installed on July 31, 2002, in the dead of night without informing his judicial colleagues. He did, however, invite televangelist D. James Kennedy to send a crew to film the project. The monument, featuring the King James version of the Decalogue, was challenged in federal court by the American Civil Liberties Union and other plaintiffs.

Judge Thompson found that Moore's purpose was to "acknowledge the Judeo-Christian God as the moral foundation of our laws," which clearly "crossed the line between the permissible and the impermissible." Thompson scored Moore's belief that "only Christianity meets the First Amendment definition of religion.... The First Amendment does not elevate one religion above all others, but rather places all religions on par with one another, and even recognizes the equality of religion and non-religion."

The bad news, of course, is that our selected president's party, which some refer to as "God's own party," has won back the Senate, giving George W. Bush effective control of two of the three branches of the federal government and a good shot at control of the third branch, if he doesn't already have it.

One need not be partisan to recognize that Bush is keen on playing to his religious right base. So we can expect to see congressional efforts to promote school vouchers, public funding expanded, the regulation of faith-based charities diminished, reproductive rights further restricted, and stem cell and cloning research blocked. Even more importantly we will see expanded efforts to pack the federal courts with judges who are unfriendly to church-state separation and civil liberties.

On taking office in 2001 Bush reinstated Ronald Reagan and George Bush senior's Mexico City policy of cutting off U.S. funding for most overseas family planning programs. And in July 2002 he blocked delivery of the $34 million that Congress had designated for the UN Population Fund, despite his own mission to China in May 2002 when he approved the grant. Bush apparently doesn't grasp that his actions actually increase the number of dangerous and illegal abortions.

If Senate Democrats and moderate Republicans have the courage to do so, they can stop the worst of the expected depredations by means of that tested tool: the filibuster. Fifty-one senators can stop the massive assault on our liberties the way the Greeks stopped the Persians at Thermopylae, and future generations will bless them for it.

Edd Doerr is the immediate past president of the American Humanist Association and president of the Americans for Religious Liberty.