June the Ten Commandments Lady
The first time I ever saw the Ten Commandments Lady in person, she was singing “Amazing Grace” next to the napkin dispenser at McDonald’s. It was a chilly Thursday night in late November, and as usual, there was standing room only at the weekly gospel-music singing attended by hundreds of old-timers from Dayton. It took me until the third stanza — “Through many dangers, toils, and snares” — to recognize June as the soloist. She appeared so put-together, with her thick, gray hair pulled tightly away from her face and her thin frame poised politely in front of the microphone. She wore an apple-red suit with a miniature Ten Commandments tablet on the lapel, and her soprano voice carried the tune well. Could this thin, unassuming sixtysomething be June Griffin, legendary defender of the Ten Commandments, the Bill of Rights, and biblical authority? The hesitant applause that followed her performance told me I’d indeed found her. Nobody in this town has ever really known what to make of June Griffin.
June, who lives by the motto “For God and country,” has lived in the area for more than twenty years now. Before that night, I’d seen her picture in the paper many times. She ran several unsuccessful campaigns for Congress on the platform of eliminating income tax, Social Security, and welfare. She is the founder of Citizen Soldiers for the Atomic Bomb, a group that confronts any antinuclear protests at the nearby Oak Ridge National Laboratory and “prays for the untimely death” of those opposed to America’s right to defend herself against her enemies.
The first I ever heard of June was in high school, back in the late nineties, when my school bus went by her general store on Highway 27 every morning and afternoon. Outside the store she kept a marquee-style sign that generated all kinds of controversy when she rearranged the letters each week, making statements like “Sexual Immorality Leads to Eternal Punishment” during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, “AIDS Is a Curse from God” on World AIDS day, and “Nice Shot” on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. On graduation morning in 1999, she posted a message warning me and my fellow high school graduates that “Higher Education = Moral Degradation.”
June earned her name as the Ten Commandments Lady when, in response to Alabama’s banishment of Judge Roy Moore and his famous Ten Commandments monument in 2003, she traveled to all ninety-five Tennessee counties to try to convince elected officials to display the Decalogue in public buildings. Thanks to June, the 5,280-pound granite monument that they kicked out of Alabama made a stop in Dayton in the back of a flatbed truck before it embarked on a nationwide tour. In her crusade to save the Ten Commandments, June has written hundreds of letters to newspapers across the state. She wrote so many to the local paper that the editor of the Dayton Herald had to place a limit on how many letters an individual could submit in a given week. If you Google June’s name, you will encounter hundreds of her essays, which range in subject from a case for the divinity of Christ to a tribute to white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith. On the side, June makes extra money selling her frilly “Bill of Rights” apron at conventions and fairs. It includes two pockets: one for your Bible and one for your gun.
June’s most recent campaign has been against what she sees as the invasion of our country by foreigners. June got herself arrested recently when she stormed into a Mexican store downtown, demanding that the owner, a legal immigrant, remove the Mexican flag from his store window. When he refused, she tore it down and demanded that he “learn to speak English or get out.” The store owner contacted police, who charged June with theft, vandalism, and civil rights intimidation. When one local reporter keenly asked June if “Thou shalt not steal” wasn’t one of the Ten Commandments, she insisted that God would let her off the hook on this one since her actions were part of a righteous war. She waved a “Remember the Alamo” banner on her way to the Rhea County Jail.
I thought about all of this as I listened to June sing under the golden arches that night about being in heaven for ten thousand years, “bright shining as the sun.” When the hymn concluded, she closed her eyes and said, “Thank you, Jesus,” which was followed by an obligatory “amen” from a smattering of seniors in the crowd. As I stood there next to a cardboard cutout of Ronald McDonald, I wondered for a moment what on earth God does with people like June when it comes time for judgment. She’s certainly not the only one who professes the name of Jesus Christ in one breath and then curses her neighbor in the next. Is that profession enough to save her? Is it worth more to God than the faith of a Buddhist or Hindu or Muslim who practices kindness and compassion?
Like a lot of people, I tend to assume that God will judge people the way I judge people; so I decided that God would probably just give June a good talking-to come judgment day. I figured he’d embarrass her in front of everybody, sort of put her in her place, before forgiving her and then welcoming her into the kingdom. I imagined that this would happen about the same time he explained to the religious right that he wasn’t a Republican, to John Calvin that he didn’t predetermine his salvation, and to Andrew Jackson that he was insulted by the notion of Manifest Destiny. Judgment day, I imagined, would be one big embarrassment for those who got it wrong and one big vindication for those of us who got it right.
Only after a few minutes did it occur to me that this might not necessarily work out to my advantage.
I was at McDonald’s that night to work on a feel-good freelance article for a Christian senior citizens’ magazine, so I snapped a picture of June, as I had all the other soloists, just to be polite. Of course, I had no intention of giving the Ten Commandments Lady any more press than she needed. But before I could leave, June pulled me aside to ask what I was working on. I told her that the story was for a Methodist publishing company, which disgusted her enough to abandon the subject, since she has created her own denomination and has no use for any others, particularly liberal ones. But before I could leave, she grabbed my arm and pointed to a mustached man sitting near the PA system.
“You should take a picture of him,” she prodded. “Don’t you think he looks just like the great Jeff Davis himself?”
“Maybe later,” I said, eager to escape the gaze of her piercing hazel eyes.
It took me two days to figure out that she was referring to Jefferson Davis, president of the Southern Confederacy.