In listening to Talk of the Nation on NPR yesterday, I heard one of the participants in the discussion on the 10 Commandments ruling opine that secularists were spending a lot of energy on religious symbols cases, and not coming out with any clear victories on them, and meanwhile they were losing in the more substantive area of government – religion interesection: school vouchers and government support for faith-based charities.

In other words, I suppose he was saying, stop wasting your time on granite plaques, secularists…

Discussions at SCOTUS and Mirror of Justice. From Rick Garnett at the latter:

For me, the most striking (for now, anyway) thing to come out of the decisions is Justice Breyer’s putting at the center of the Establishment Clause inquiry his predictions and observations about "political divisiveness" and "social conflict."  In his view, it appears that avoiding social dissension is more than a policy desideratum or a prudent aspiration. It is, somehow, a fundamental, judicially enforceable religion clause "principle".  This view takes us back to then-Chief Justice Warren Burger’s statement, in the landmark case of Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971), that "political division along religious lines was one of the principal evils against which the First Amendment was intended to protect."  Burger foresaw "considerable political activity" on the part of "partisans of parochial schools," and would have none of it.  Such activity, he feared, "would tend to confuse and obscure other issues of great urgency."

As I’ve said before, it is not clear why our political, cultural, and other "divisions" should be relevant to the legal question of whether a particular policy is constitutionally permissible.