Once in office, Reagan put Ed Meese in charge of screening potential nominees for ideological purity and cut the American Bar Association out of the vetting process until after nominees were already announced (a tactic that's been reprised by George W. Bush). (For an excellent history of Reagan's judicial juggernaut, see Herman Schwartz's 1988 book Packing the Courts.)

Suhrheinrich was later placed on the Sixth Circuit Appeals Court by George Bush Sr., whose judicial nominations were then being shepherded by White House counsel C. Boyden Gray, a man whose stated aim was "to shift the courts in a more conservative direction." Gray now runs the Committee for Justice, an organization led by corporate heavy-hitters whose mission is to help push George W.'s judicial nominees onto the federal bench; the committee produced a series of ads accusing Democrats of religious bias for filibustering ultraconservative nominee William Pryor, a Catholic who supports mandatory school prayer and sees the Constitution as a "Christian" document. At the time, the Free Congress Foundation applauded Suhrheinrich as a "strict-constructionist," a conservative code word that has become quite familiar in today's battles over judicial appointments.

The display in question in ACLU of Kentucky v. Mercer County was mounted in a county courthouse in Kentucky and entitled "Foundations of American Law and Government." The display gives the Ten Commandments, a religious document, equal weight with such legally significant documents as the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. A caption under the Ten Commandments claims that it "provide[d] the moral background of the Declaration of Independence and the foundation of our legal tradition." The display also includes the text of the Mayflower Compact, a 1620 colonial charter frequently quoted in conservative Christian books seeking to establish America's "Christian heritage" because it declares the Pilgrims' purpose to be "the Glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith." Yet Suhrheinrich still argued that "[a] reasonable observer would not view this display as an attempt by Mercer County to establish religion. Instead, he would view it for what it is: an acknowledgement of history."

This is precisely the argument of advocates of the disingenuous claim that America was founded as a "Christian nation"--that biblical law is a central part of American history. They selectively quote documents like the Mayflower Compact and tiptoe around the godless Constitution itself. Listen to the words of the attorney representing Mercer County in the case, Mathew Staver, president of the Liberty Counsel, a conservative Christian legal outfit affiliated with Falwell's Liberty University School of Law, after the Sixth Circuit decision came down: "Today's decision begins to turn the tide against the ACLU, which has been on a search-and-destroy mission to remove all vestiges of our religious history from public view. Whether the ACLU likes it or not, history is crystal clear that each one of the Ten Commandments played an important role in the founding of our system of law and government."

Court decisions like the Sixth Circuit's bolster these Christian supremacist views of history.