Responding to an increase in “moral turpitude,” the Lawrence Christian Fellowship has begun circulating a petition to have replicas of the Ten Commandments posted visibly at each Judicial Board hearing. If the petition is successful, the Commandments, reportedly handed down to Moses by famous deity Yahweh during the forty years the Israelites spent wandering in the desert, would be engraved on real stone and hung “visibly, and with appropriate reverence,” somewhere at each meeting of the student-run Judicial Board. The petition requests that if stone is deemed too expensive, the tablets be replaced with “well-painted Styrofoam replicas.”
According to LCF member Melody Waring, the Commandments would provide a visible symbol of morality and rectitude. “It would be a moral compass to our wandering and lost students. Also, having the Commandments posted in a visible location might help speed up J-Board hearings, since the sight of the tablets would inspire the guilty to examine their consciences and surrender themselves to the mercy of a higher authority,” Waring added.
LUCC president Ann Miller echoed Waring’s feelings, telling *******Lawrentian******** reporters “You know, sometimes I suspect that some of our students just don’t believe. I don’t want to be so harsh, but I see students getting drunk at parties, then fornicating or defacing property. Well, I don’t see it, but people tell me about it. Well, I hear people telling other people about it. If we had the Commandments posted in our court of law, students would remember that when we break the Commandments we don’t just hurt our fellow students, we hurt our Lord God. What it comes down to is people need a visible sign of the divine to keep them in line. Hey, that rhymes!”
Despite the strong support for the petition, and over three hundred signatures, some are cynical about its chances of success. “You don’t suppose they mean it, do you?” Professor Goldgar was heard to say shortly before his death. “Now, I’m not a Christian, so you tell me. What are they thinking? They came over here to try to get me to sign, and I saw names like Saint Peter and John the Baptist on the list. Even at Lawrence, I don’t think dead saints can legally sign. ‘Course, I didn’t believe gender studies was a real major until last year.”
Not all segments of the Lawrence Christian community support the petition movement. LCF radical James DeCaro responded to the deployment of the petition by announcing that he and a splinter group of guerrillas calling themselves WRATH would bypass the “secular administrative process” to execute the insertion of the Commandments. DeCaro went on to assert that his group would forcibly place the Commandments “wherever it is that J-Board meets.” WRATH was forced to admit defeat later that week, citing the fact that “no one in WRATH has ever been to J-Board, so we have no idea where it is.” WRATH representatives declined to comment on the meaning of their acronym.
LCF officers have decried DeCaro’s insurgents and dismissed cynics in an open letter to the student body written by Miller. The letter, which is available in full on the Lawrentian website at http://restricted.lawrentian.com/freepiratedmoviesandporn/LCFletter.html, begins by denying all responsibility for DeCaro’s WRATH and declaring the group anathema. It goes on to request that Professor Goldgar and other cynics “get [themselves] behind [us],” before concluding that “as the Constitution says, we are one student body, under God, indivisible.”
The Lawrence administration would not comment on the petition, explaining that it was “putting in, like, really long hours on this web-registration thing. We’re just totally checked out on everything else. We are *****totally***** wiped out on this thing, man.
LCF petitions to have Ten Commandments posted at J-board -dlh
