Louisiana recently became the first state to mandate that the Ten Commandments from the Bible be displayed in every public school classroom. Republican Governor Jeff Landry made the rule officials when he signed HB71 into law earlier this week.
The bill passed the Louisiana Senate in a 30-8 vote with little opposition, then passed in the House in a 79-16 vote. While the bill may have faced little opposition in Louisiana’s state politics, the American Civil Liberties Union vowed to challenge the law where the case could go before the Supreme Court.
The legislation was first introduced by Republican Louisiana State Rep. Dodie Horton, who explained that the Ten Commandments were the “basis of all laws” in the Bayou State. She said, “I hope and I pray that Louisiana is the first state to allow moral code to be placed back in the classrooms. Since I was in kindergarten (at a private school), it was always on the wall. I learned there was a God, and I knew to honor him and his laws.”
Notably, every vote of opposition came from Democratic state congressmen. Democratic state senator Royce Duplesis, who identifies with the Catholic faith, expressed that if children want to learn the Ten Commandments, they should do it at a church.
“I didn’t have to learn the Ten Commandments in school. We went to Sunday school,” said Duplesis. “You want your kids to learn about the Ten Commandments, take them to church.” He further complained the ensuing legal challenges that would come about. “We’re going to spend valuable state resources defending the law when we really need to be teaching our kids how to read and write,” he said. “I don’t think this is appropriate for us to mandate.”
The new Louisiana law has been met with significant criticism, particularly from the left, arguing that it is a violation of the separation of church and state. The American Tribune reported on backlash from ABC’s “The View,” where the panelists speculated the Supreme Court might even rule that the Louisiana law is constitutional.
Co-host Sunny Hostin said, “I think what he is banking on is that this sort of reactive, very partisan Supreme Court will overturn precedent and say, Now this is okay, and we should be very afraid of that, because we’re now an upside down world where you have a precedent from, you know, this century saying you cannot do that anywhere.”
Expressing a lack of confidence that the Supreme Court would uphold judicial precedent on the matter, she lamented that it could bring about an end to the principle of separating religion from the government. “I’m not sure. And this is, and I feel terrible saying that, because normally I would say that’s something like super precedent. It’s not super president, but it’s just the definition of church and state and the separation of it, and it’s one of the tenets of our society,” she added.
Featured image credit: Joshua Keller, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gutenberg_Bible,_New_York_Public_Library,_USA._Pic_01.jpg