"The public can assume now that the more politicians trumpet their religious convictions, the less likely are they to live up to them," writes Scheer, contributing editor to the Los Angeles Times (and the conductor of Playboy's famous 1976 Jimmy Carter "adultery in my heart" interview). "Clearly [New York Mayor] Rudolph Giuliani could not have believed that his own adulterous behavior would somehow go unobserved by the God whose judgment he claimed to fear, and one is left wondering if the former prosecutor's public posturing on religion was meant as some sort of sleazy plea bargain with the Supreme Being. More important than the collapse of his political career is the reminder that the use of religion by politicians is a spectacle that inevitably is deserving of derision."

The American Civil Liberties Union of West Virginia filed a federal complaint against a Charleston, West Virginia, circuit court judge for bringing in a minister to pray before a May 1999 grand jury proceeding. The complaint claims that by asking the grand jury to bow their heads, Judge Thomas A. Frye Jr. violated the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The ACLU is waging the battle on the federal level after the state's Judicial Investigation Commission dismissed by the complaint last August.

The ACLU also sued Richmond County, Georgia, this week, saying its Superior Court seal violates the First Amendment because it has an image apparently of the Ten Commandments. Not that there's anything written on the tablets like "Have no other gods before me": ...