Last December I visited D.C. for the second time and the Supreme Court for the first time. I got an eye-opening lesson in U.S.history, especially in the origins of the Constitution and American Constititional law. My neighbors hereabouts had always told me of the divine origins of the Constitution, how Jesus Christ descended upon Philadelphia in the late spring of 1787 and wrote the Constitution, which event acounts for both the document's infallibility and its divine inspiration. But look what I found in a place of honor in the Great Hall of the U.S. Supreme Court:

"Minerva Dictating the Constitution to Young America"

Carved in marble, the true story of the divine origin of the Supreme Law of the Land. It wasn't Jesus who descended from heaven but the Roman pagan Goddess of War & Wisdom!  She who sprang full grown, helmeted, and fully armed from either the forehead or the thigh of Zeus. The latinate equivalent of Pallas Athene, AKA Athena, the even more ancient Greek Goddess for whom Athens was named: Athens, the birthplace of democracy. Stranger than fiction. Don't tell the Fundies, they'll have a fit.  The Founders believed that a pagan Roman goddess dictated the Constitution!

Still more historical revelations are revealed in other sections of the great marble frieze (that had to be photographed in sections through thick glass panels, sorry). Here are enshrined the honored Precursors of the American Legal Tradition, those who inspired and laid the groundwork for our sacred Constitutional Law Tradition. In the section above, we see the Egyptian Pharoah Menes, Hammurabi of Babylon, and Moses.  What? Non-Americans?? Non-Christians?? Non-whites?? Why, that's "un-Amurikun"! That ain't right. It just can't be! What's next?