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April 21, 2009

Senate votes for 10 Commandments monument

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By Ron Jenkins, Associated Press Writer

OKLAHOMA CITY — The Oklahoma Senate voted overwhelmingly Monday to allow a Ten Commandments monument on the Capitol grounds after heated debate over good and evil and political expediency.

Sen. Randy Brogdon, R-Owasso, said his bill merely tried to recognize the Ten Commandments as a historical document that formed the basis for the country’s laws.

“It’s like the Liberty Bell,” Brogdon said.

Sen. Judy Eason McIntyre, however, charged that the measure was a political ploy aimed at getting Brogdon elected governor, playing to “uneducated people” who “do not understand anything other than wedge issues like this.

“If it’s not God, if it’s not gays, if it’s not guns, they don’t care,” she said.

After Senate Democratic leader Charlie Laster spoke to McIntyre, she said: “I apologize, Sen. Brogdon, for calling your name. But I still say this is a bad bill and the intent is very, very mean.”

She said it put the state’s “backward thinking” on display for the rest of the country.

Brogdon, who officially announced his candidacy for governor at the state GOP convention on Saturday, said he did not know how to respond to the allegations of McIntyre, D-Tulsa, and Sen. Constance Johnson, D-Oklahoma City.

Johnson said she found the intent of the bill “very offensive” and “hypocritical.” She said she had not been able to get a hearing on a proposed monument honoring blacks’ contribution to the state’s political history.

Brogdon said McIntyre knows he is not a hypocrite and expressed dismay he had been referred to as having “mean” and “evil” intent.

He later said he was “tired of being called a racist on the Senate floor,” accusing McIntyre and Johnson, who are black, of “hysteria” and interjecting race into the arguments over the bill.

“We’re talking about the Ten Commandments, for crying out loud, and they brought up race. That’s quite a stretch,” he said.

McIntyre and Johnson said Barack Obama, the country’s first black president, has been held up to ridicule in Oklahoma through legislative resolutions and politically inspired demonstrations.

“If we’re not careful, we’ll have another civil war,” McIntyre said.

Sen. Jim Wilson, D-Tahlequah, said the law is “obviously unconstitutional,” despite arguments the Supreme Court has upheld a similar Texas law. Wilson said “the facts are much different” in Texas, where the Ten Commandments was located in a monument park for four decades.

Sen. Tom Adelson, D-Tulsa, voted against the bill, saying it violated the Oklahoma Constitution.

Adelson said that as a Jewish person, he is offended by efforts to “secularize” the Ten Commandments.

“It is clearly a religious symbol; I would not have it referred to any other way,” he said.

Sen. Bill Brown, R-Broken Arrow, said the Ten Commandments all involve moral issues that can guide the nation, apart from any religious aspect.

“I think our country can stand and live on moral issues,” he said.

The bill must return to the House and Brogdon indicated it would go to a joint conference committee.

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