Judge points to absolute truth: Judge M. Ashley McKathan tells about his decision to have the Ten Commandments embroidered on his judicial robes.

M. Ashley McKathan is a circuit court judge in Covington County, Alabama, and presides from the bench at the county courthouse in Andalusia. Last December 13, Judge McKathan began wearing a judicial robe in his courtroom upon which he had the Ten Commandments embroidered in gold lettering. Within two days, the national news media were reporting on the judge's action, drawing immediate comparisons to former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore's battle to place a Ten Commandments monument in the state Supreme Court rotunda. Judge McKathan was interviewed for THE NEW AMERICAN by Warren Mass. (See "The Goodness of America" in THE NEW AMERICAN for January 24 for a related story.)

THE NEW AMERICAN: Judge McKathan, what inspired you to make the law your lifetime career?

Judge M. Ashley McKathan: I really don't know what put that notion into my head. The earliest remembrance I have of lawyers is from being at the cafe down here--it's called the Rooster Cafe. I had a great uncle who would bring me to town with him on Saturdays. And we were in there eating dinner sitting in a booth and I'd stand up and look over the back of the booth--I was a little bitty kid--and I asked my uncle, "Uncle Sidney, why do all those people have on their Sunday clothes if it's not Sunday?"

And he replied; "Oh they're a bunch of ol' lawyers I reckon."

And they all laughed. I guessed it must be nice to sit around in your Sunday clothes and not have to work--that was the wrong conception.

TNA: Was it your understanding from your legal studies that our system of law has always acknowledged the law of God as the basis for human law?

Judge McKathan: I really learned more about that after I got out of law school. The funny thing about law school is that they spend very little time talking about the relationship of truth and the law or even how they intersect--and what that is supposed to mean in the practice of law. You would think a great deal of time would be spent on those things, but virtually no time is spent on them.

TNA: You were quoted in the national media as believing that the Ten Commandments represent the truth "and you can't divorce the law from the truth.... The Ten Commandments can help a judge know the difference between right and wrong." Have you had any difficult cases in your career where your reliance on the truth of the Ten Commandments or on the truth found in the Bible has helped clarify your thinking and made your decision easier?

Judge McKathan: Absolutely! It can arise in many different ways but one of the areas where this comes up most frequently is in making child custody decisions. Without some guiding principles, how do you decide what is in the best interest of the child? I often use this example--and I haven't seen anybody publish it yet--if you had a child custody case in which the parents appeared otherwise equally able to parent the child but one was a Christian or a Jewish person and the other was a Satanist, who do you give the child to? The answer to that question is a religious answer. You seldom have that extreme, but you have variations of that issue that arise in child custody cases. That is just an extreme example but the principle comes up in all kinds of situations of the law.

TNA: When THE NEW AMERICAN asked Justice Moore in 2002 what prompted him to put the Ten Commandments monument in the courthouse he answered: "The Commandments were placed in the court to acknowledge the moral foundation of our law and the foundation of our government." Is this the same reason you had the Ten Commandments embroidered on your robe?

Judge McKathan: I agree with those statements, but I would phrase my own insistence on those Commandments a little bit differently. I try to put it in a nutshell; "you can't divorce the law from truth and get justice." I put the Commandments on my robe because a lot of the special interest groups are trying to remove any reference to truth from the law. In fact, a lot of legal scholars do that--not only do they reject Christian truth, they think that truth is virtually unimportant. They think the law is merely a results-oriented thing. And that is all nice to speculate about in legal periodicals, but you can't sit on the bench and do that.

TNA: Were you surprised by the nationwide publicity you have received?

Judge McKathan: I wasn't so much surprised about the publicity as I was by its immediacy.... I put the robe on Monday and by Wednesday all this was across the nation.

TNA: To what do you attribute the national interest in your decision ? Have the Ten Commandments become that controversial in our nation?

Judge McKathan: It's often referred to as a culture war, and there is one. By and large, the people understand, and they're very interested in the issue. They know you can't get away from the basics and have a legal system that works. They don't want to be governed by a legal system that is alien to their beliefs. They're intensely interested. On the other hand, you have special interest groups that take a contrary position for their own reasons, and so you have conflict. When you have conflict, people are interested.

TNA: Can you tell us a little bit more about the culture war?

Judge McKathan: The problem with the culture war is in understanding that truth has sustained Western Civilization for 2000 years. Those who now want to divorce us from that truth have no consensus, no sense at all, about what they want to replace it with. It is one thing to say that you can't refer to the long-held principles of Western Civilization in the context of the law, but if you're going to say that, truth comes from somewhere. Either you have got to tell judges at this point what you want that truth to be, or else you leave every judge to make up his own mind about what the truth is. If he does that, every judge is a law unto himself--there is no rule of law.

TNA: At about the same time stories about your decision started making the news, we once again witnessed many stories about the ACLU taking communities across America to court for putting up Christmas displays on public property. Is there a connection? Is any public display in our nation that acknowledges God now subject to controversy and attack?

Judge McKathan: We're living in a time when if any person asserts that there is absolute truth, he is subject to attack--unless he just does so in church on Sunday or stays in his own home. Modernists will quickly tell you that whatever you believe is your truth; whatever somebody else believes is their truth. That is another way of saying there is no truth. There is an absolute truth. We know what it is, but if we didn't there would still be an absolute truth. The revulsion of some to the statement that there is absolute truth is a revulsion to any standards of conduct that can be enforced.

TNA: When both Justice Moore and you attended a Rotary Club luncheon in Opp, Alabama, in December, a group of self-proclaimed atheists affiliated with the Atheist Law Center of Montgomery protested outside with a banner that read, "Separate Religion from Government." What was your reaction to this protest?

Judge McKathan: Everybody is entitled to express themselves--this is America. Protest doesn't bother me. If they meant to hurt my feelings, they didn't. I don't mind people disagreeing with me.

TNA: What about the so-called principle of "separation of church and state"--is this a much-misunderstood principle? Judge McKathan: It is, because that phrase is used so frequently it becomes ingrained in people as if it were embedded in the Constitution, and it's not. Clearly, everybody has the right to worship whatever God they choose--or no God at all--and the rest of us are going to respect that and respect them and cherish those people.

But that is different than implying that our Founding Fathers lacked any special relationship with Judeo-Christian tradition. Because that relationship existed. Judges and others, when they were called upon to exercise their judgment about what the truth was, could abide by that ethic or not, but at least they knew what it was. They knew what was expected. Our government has and always has had a special relationship with that ethic. Insofar as declaring that there is a state religion--the government can't do that. But it can look to the wisdom of the ages, which numbers of the Founding Fathers relied on when they launched this country. In fact, you've often heard it said that most of them were "deists," but most of them weren't. There were a few deists, four or five maybe; the rest were staunchly Christian. I do believe that the notion "separation of church and state" is much misunderstood and that it's been hijacked for use by people who want it to be misunderstood.

TNA: Is there anything else that you might like to offer?

Judge McKathan: I'm concerned that people might think I'm worthy to wear that robe. I'm not, and nobody else is. Nobody can live their whole life through without violating any of the Commandments--that is not what it's about. While we strive to abide by those Commandments, we sometimes fail. Grace covers the failure. All I'm saying is the principles are true, and they represent a connection to the broader truth--they've always been our symbol for the connection between law and truth. Some of us--worthy or not--have to take a stand that that connection has to be the truth.