The Ten Commandments as laws

Blogger Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars knows all Ten Commandments and eviscerates right-wing politicos (Huckabee being the latest) who think that that portion of the Bible should be written into US law.

The short version: only two of commandments would even be constitutional as laws (not murdering and not stealing), and they of course are moral injunctions commonplace under most religions or none at all.

It used to be that liberals could be defined, in part, as people who felt that all good things should be written into law, such as wearing seat belts and not smoking. Conservatives were, in part, people who considered this kind of thing imprudent, utopian, or just plain wrong. These days I would, as a first approximation, define an intelligent conservative as someone who appreciates how un-conservative the idea of writing the Ten Commandments into law is.