Judge Roy Moore, the Alabama court judge who built his credentials among the religious by defying court orders to take down a wooden idol of the Ten Commandments in his courtroom, is at it again. Since he can no longer adjudicate from the chair (he was removed from his post by an Alabama judicial ethics panel), he now tries to make law from the far safer, far more lucrative bench of a conservative religious legal foundation called the Foundation for Moral Law. He recently sent some ripples through the religious media when his foundation filed a friend-of-the-court brief in a lawsuit against the state of Texas for their restrictions on “moments of silence” in public schools. The brief itself is little more than an ambling manifesto against the separation of church and state, reading much more like an old man sitting on his porch shaking his fist at passing children than as a polished, professional legal brief.

But, it seems that Mr. Moore did not simply fade away after the Ten Commandments circus as I thought he would, and indeed he has cast himself as a long-term, in-it-to-win antagonist of everyone who wants to keep the church out of the government. As it appears that we will have Roy Moore to contend with for some time, I think that we have to start asking certain questions.

Moore’s claim to fame among the theocratic is his belief that the Ten Commandments are in some way the “foundation” of American law. During the media hubbub about whether Moore had violated this or that part of Alabama state law or the Constitution itself, nobody ever stopped to ask what I think is the most important question of the day: was he right? Are the Ten Commandments responsible for our most cherished judicial principles? It may surprise you when I say that no, no they are not.

First of all, Moore himself does not appear to be very familiar with his own Bible. If he were, he would have known that the rules we today call “The Ten Commandments” were never once explicitly described as being written on stone (his wooden reproduction of the Commandments clearly shows the Commandments written on stone tablets) in the fanciful Exodus myth of the Pentateuch. There were ten rules that were written on stone tablets given to Moses, but this was the so-called “Ritual Decalogue,” which gives such unmemorable legal advice as “do not boil a baby goat in its mother’s milk” and “sacrifice firstborn male animals to Yahweh.” The image we have of Charlton Heston descending from on high with the Law of Moses written in stone hoisted over either burly shoulder is nothing more than a crude cultural parody of what the Bible itself actually says, but I think we can move on from Moore’s Biblical illiteracy since it is not at all the worst of his slanders against American law.

But even if Moore were not completely ignorant of the superstitions he claims to champion, he would still be wrong on the notion that the Ten Commandments in some way form the foundation of American law. One of the most important principles of the Constitution of the United States is this: it can be amended. When we mutually agreed that slavery, contrary to Biblical injunction, was wrong, we added the 13th Amendment with the consent of the people. When there was an apparently irreparable hole in the way that states conducted civil rights law, we added the 14th Amendment, again with the consent of the governed. That is the Constitution’s great strength: we do not deify the Founding Fathers to the point where we conceive of their word as final, exhaustive, and infallible. Instead, we have room to hammer out new laws to fit new situations that could not have been foreseen even by geniuses like Madison, Jefferson, and Franklin.

What parallel to this is there in the Ten Commandments? What room for amendment is there in the Word of God? None whatsoever. This problem is in fact even more profound for Moore because he is not Jewish, in which case his discourse would be constrained only by the Hebrew Testament, he is a Christian. This means that he is also bound by Jesus’s supposed proclamation that in principle not so much as a fraction of a letter of the Law of Moses can be expiated by any means. There is not even an exception made for God himself to change the Ten Commandments.

And what of the Laws themselves? Not one of them is reflected, either verbatim or even in principle, anywhere in the Constitution, some of them are obvious and are reflected in numerous other primitive codes of law, and some of them are directly antithetical to the promises given in the Constitution. The first five Commandments (I use the Jewish parsing of the Laws here) are a hat trick of unAmerican judicial failure:

1. I (Yahweh) am the Lord your God.
2. You will have no other Gods before me, nor will you make any false idols.
3. You will not misuse the name of God.

These rules are all obviously antithetical to the Establishment Clause, which was specifically set up to prevent the government from making proclamations like this. Any law that ever existed proclaiming that Yahweh is the only God, or that non-Judeo-Christian Gods are forbidden, or that saying “God dammit, I can’t believe Roy Moore actually thinks that he has a substantial legal case” is an offense against the law has been eliminated, and any future laws will not outlive the blink of an eye in any reputable American court.

4. Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.

This one firstly would require the government to figure out when the Sabbath is (the Jews say it’s Friday, most Christians say Sunday, most Mormons and some off-the-mainstream say it’s Saturday, and I’ve heard of at least one church that says Wednesday), and then the court would have to tell us all that we can’t work on that day. The Bible says that the punishment for breaking the Sabbath is murder by your fellow citizens, with no exception made for doctors, soldiers, or children. So not only would this require American courts to legislate on religious calendars, it would also shut down our economy one day out of the week and fill death row with anyone who dares to deliver the Sunday Times. Is Roy Moore prepared to defend this as a bedrock principle of American law?

5. Honor your father and mother.

Not bad advice, but then, the Confucians made a religion out of ancestor-worship and they didn’t seem to need the Ten Commandments to do it, so in what way could we plausibly argue that without the Hebrew Testament, nobody would ever honor their parents? And, of course, no exception is made for abusive, murderous parents, just another reason if Moses were an intelligent dictatorship (or, at least, a conduit for a far greater dictatorship), he would have left a little wiggle room. There is none.

6. You will not kill.
7. You will not commit adultery.
8. You will not steal.
9. You will not perjure your neighbor.

The idea that the sixth commandment actually says “you will not murder” is simply untrue; the Hebrew language at the time lacked any word distinguishing killing other people from murdering other people (the distinction is rather sophisticated when you think about it). In all probability, the original commandments probably were just a single word with a negative prefix, reading like “no-kill” and “no-steal” to honest translators. The commandment against killing is paradoxically sandwiched between stories of Israelites ankle-deep in the blood of some foreign tribe, but less us pretend for the moment that the Bible were at all consistent. Roy Moore is now in the position of abolishing the death penalty, firearm possession, and the military. If he is against stealing in principle, then it is unconscionable that the US government would seize the assets of terrorists and drug warlords for use repairing the damage they’ve done. Clever hair-splitting occasionally renders “do not lie” as the flaccid and obvious “do not perjure” (which is completely unfaithful to the original Hebrew), so Moore must then be against lying in principle (or else he is a bad Christian and/or illiterate). As such, remember that when the Nazi stormtroopers come poking around for Anne Frank, Roy Moore wants you to tell them everything you know about where she’s hiding.

And if Roy Moore really needs God to tell him not to cheat on his wife, then he’s in even worse shape that I postulate.

10. You will not covet your neighbor’s house, goods, possessions, slaves, beasts of burden, or wife.

Every faithful translation loops the “wife” in with all the other material possessions (you will also notice that there is no commandment not to covet your neighbor’s husband). So, first of all Roy Moore must think that it is a foundational truth of American law that women are property (if he does not, he is either a bad Christian or a liar), and not only that, but that capitalism is inherently evil. For indeed how could our economic system survive if advertisers couldn’t play off your jealousy of the handsome man with the lavish vacation home, or the chic and sexy young woman with earrings more expensive than your car, or any of the irksome jealousies that drive you out of your home to buy this or that or the other in the name of looking like you’ve succeeded over others?

Roy Moore is obviously wrong about the Ten Commandments, and if he believes what he says about them then he is an anti-American, anti-freedom ruthlessly theocratic nut who would rid us of our military, our economy, and our rights. If he does not believe it, or if he is so Biblically illiterate (or just plain old regular-illiterate) as to not understand what he believes, then he is not qualified to tell us free-worshiping, freethinking American citizens how to regulate the government that serves us. Moore’s government starts with a bully in the sky, our government starts with the mutual consent of the governed. The problem we face is that everybody has the insight to question the Constitutionality of Moore’s attempts to use his taxpayer-funded court to attribute our success as a nation to the ancient legal code of an extinct bronze age totalitarian theocracy, but nobody has the spine to ask if Roy Moore was even right.

And now that it has been asked, the answer is clear: Roy Moore is wrong on the law, wrong on the Bible, wrong on history, and wrong for America.