Montgomery, Ala. ? A federal judge said Friday that the state of Alabama was in compliance with his order requiring the removal of a Ten Commandments monument from the rotunda of the Alabama Judicial Building.

The 5,300-pound monument that Chief Justice Roy Moore installed two summers ago was moved Wednesday and is now inside a locked storage room off an employee lunchroom, Atty. Gen. Bill Pryor said in a conference call Friday with U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson.

“We told the court that we had verified the monument was moved and are satisfied the state is in compliance with the court order,” said Richard Cohen, an attorney for plaintiffs who sued to have the monument removed.

The judge told attorneys he would issue an order later Friday declaring the state in compliance, according to Cohen, of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

More than 1,000 supporters of the monument rallied on the steps of the building Thursday, the largest crowd since the two-week vigil over the monument began.

At the rally Christian radio host James Dobson chastised “an unelected, nonaccountable, arrogant, imperialistic judiciary determined to shove their beliefs down our throats.”

A group that sued to have the monument removed said Dobson and other religious leaders were trying to fan the United States into a full-scale culture war.

“It won’t work,” said Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “Very few people have any interest in starting political fights with their neighbors over religion.”

Thompson ruled last year that the monument, when it sat in the building’s rotunda, violated the Constitution’s ban against government promotion of religion. Moore refused to comply with the order to move it, was overruled by his eight colleagues on the court and was suspended on ethics charges.

Moore plans to file an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court next month.

Pryor has defended the associate justices’ decision to overrule the chief justice. Moore has been critical of them all, as well as of Gov. Bob Riley, like Pryor a fellow Republican.

Patrick Mahoney, director of the Christian Defense Coalition, said Friday he would deliver a plaque of the Ten Commandments to Riley next week to “display publicly” in the Alabama Statehouse.

Riley has said that he thinks displaying the Ten Commandments in public places is constitutional, but that the state must also obey the federal courts.