If Fortune ever smiled on Alabama and the rest of the 50 states over the last 100 years, it smiled last Thursday.

The Alabama Supreme Court ordered its Chief Justice, Roy Moore, to remove a marble stanchion bearing the Ten Commandments from the court building in Montgomery.

Bravely, Moore refuses and we now have the ingredients of a welcome crisis – in Dixie, fittingly – a genuine test of wills between one man and the federal Leviathan.

Given the hysteria, you’d think Moore had proposed female circumcision for all the women employees of his court. But the trouble brews over a small monument, which bears an inscription that says it contains the “laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.”

This, a federal court harrumphed, violates the “government ban” on the state promoting religion, as the news reports put it, and Moore’s colleagues on the state court agreed in bovine submission.

Amusingly, the state attorney general says he agrees with Moore in principle and doesn’t like the federal court decision, but applauds the Alabama justices for respecting “the rule of law.” Apparently, he didn’t think how that sounded to anyone who understands the rule of law. If “the rule of law” meant anything in this country, I wouldn’t be writing this column.

The questions here aren’t merely practical, but philosophical, and define our Republic: Does the rule of law mean anything? Does the federal government have the powers it claims? Is Moore right or wrong?

That’s where the Constitution comes in, and that means the old one created to control federal power, not the new one used to destroy states’ rights. Anyone who understands the Constitution the way the framers understood it knows Moore is right. He stands on the firm ground of the real Constitution, not the shifting sands of the liberal “living Constitution.”

The marble icon does not trespass the Constitution and its “establishment clause” in the First Amendment. The monument doesn’t establish anything, and merely states the historic truth about the foundation of American law.

If that’s offensive to atheists, Amen. Our legal system is built upon laws rooted not in The Humanist Manifesto but in the Holy Bible.

Second, even if the monument did establish something, the establishment clause does not apply to the states. It applies to Congress. Supreme Court pettifogging and dusty precedent regardless, the Constitution does not empower a federal court or federal anything else to govern religious practices among the states.

Most Supreme Court decisions are unconstitutional and worthless, like paper money, and we obey them only because we mistakenly believe we must.

Now’s the time to disobey.

Moore will appeal again, and flanked by his Christian supporters on Thursday, vowed to fight. He should go farther, inasmuch as state and federal lawmen or troops might be required to enforce this unconstitutional federal ukase. He should dare Alabama’s governor, or better yet, that evangelical Christian, President George W. Bush, to deploy state police, U.S. Marshals or the National Guard to tear down the Ten Commandments.

Imagine Bush, who said Jesus was his favorite philosopher, sending in troops to destroy an image of the laws God gave to Moses.

This is the kind of fight that sparks the kind of rebellion that spreads like a sagebrush fire. Roy Moore and the Christians have just one job:

Light it.

R. Cort Kirkwood is a syndicated columnist.