Religious Monuments on Public Property

Oh, for fuck's sake.

I wake up this morning and pull up the electronic version of the local paper (yes, I'm one of those oddities that actually pays money to keep the news engines fed somewhat), and come across this article.  Go ahead and give it a read... for the tl;dr crowd, it's a retired pastor writing about why a Ten Commandments monument in a public park in a small community is a "big deal" for the Christians in that community.

The first problem I have with this is actually with the newspaper... they ran this as "local news", when it's clearly an opinion piece, but that's not what I want to focus on.

The major problem I have with this piece is that it highlights a major blind-spot that is common to fundamentalists off all stripes, religious and otherwise... basically, that My Way is Right, so everyone should do things My Way.  This neglects both the spirit of our country's founding (that whole "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" thing), and the rules that we're all supposed to abide by as citizens of this country, starting with the Constitution.

I have no problem with the Ten Commandments as such... in fact, I wish more of the members of the Abrahamic religions were a little more strict in their observation.  I also get that this monument is likely one of those relics of the days when some organization was giving them out for free to try and stem the tide of "godless communism", and I don't hold any ill will to anybody involved in that back then.  However, that was then, and this is now... and, when we have groups using religion to divide rather than unite us, as is now the case, it's all the more important for us to fall back on the concepts that brought our country into being and enabled us to co-exist mostly peacefully (excepting the Civil War, of course) for the past couple of centuries.  Prime among those, as in listed first in the First Amendment of the Constitution, is not doing anything to say or imply that one religion (or branch of a religion) has a favored status with the government.

There's a whole can of worms that can be opened up there, as there is with much of the Constitution... what the words actually say versus the perceived intent of the founders, among others.  Personally, I'm of a literalistic mindset, so, if anything, I find the fact that the wording only references Congress passing laws on important things like religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition disturbing... but the prevailing interpretation at this point in time, as tested again and again by lawsuits reaching the Supreme Court, is that, if something is publicly funded or owned, that either no religious influence is allowed, or all religions are allowed to come play on equal grounds.  You don't have to like that interpretation, but you do have to abide by it, unless you want to further fuel the growing schism in this country.  Of course, you could always see about getting the Constitution amended to your liking... I'll likely oppose it, but I'll support your right to try.

With that all said, what should be done with that monument?  The only bad thing about it is that it's on publicly-owned property.  So, either surplus the thing, let it sell at auction, and let the buyer move it wherever they own space to put it (out front of a church or similar sounds ideal), or sell it and the property it resides on, at market rates, along with enough adjoining land to meet existing codes (so, for example, if it's in the middle of a park, sell enough land to access the monument without going through the public park), and leave maintenance of that land and the monument to the new owner.  Either way should fix the basic problem... one side or the other might not care for the solution, based on their views, but that, in and of itself, is not the public's problem.