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Louisiana Requires Ten Commandments in Public School Classrooms
- Milton Quintanilla Crosswalk Headlines Contributor
- Updated Jun 20, 2024
Louisiana became the first U.S. state to require public school classrooms to display the Ten Commandments after Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed a GOP-backed bill on Wednesday. According to The Christian Post, Republican Rep. Dodie Horton sponsored House Bill 71, which orders public school classrooms to display a poster-sized copy of the Ten Commandments found in the Old Testament books of Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 by January 2025.
“If you want to respect the rule of law, you’ve got to start from the original law given, which was Moses,” Landry said during a signing ceremony on Wednesday.
According to the legislation, the display must be a “poster or framed document at least eleven inches by fourteen inches.” Meanwhile, the text of the Ten Commandments must be the “central focus” of the poster or framed documents, which shall be printed in “large, easily readable font.”
Additionally, the display must include a four-paragraph “context statement” telling readers that “The Ten Commandments were a prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries.”
“Around the year 1688, The New England Primer became the first published American textbook and was the equivalent of a first-grade reader. The New England Primer was used in public schools throughout the United States for more than one hundred fifty years to teach Americans to read and contained more than forty questions about the Ten Commandments,” the context statement reads.
“The Ten Commandments were also included in public school textbooks published by educator William McGuffey, a noted university president and professor. A version of his famous McGuffey Readers was written in the early 1800s and became one of the most popular textbooks in the history of American education, selling more than one hundred million copies. Copies of the McGuffey Readers are still available today.”
The new law is already under the threat of lawsuits by secular church-state separation groups, arguing that it violates the U.S. Constitution’s Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
For instance, The American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Louisiana, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and the Freedom from Religion Foundation announced their intention to file a lawsuit.
The groups contend that Ten Commandment displays in public school classrooms equate to “religious coercion of students, who are legally required to attend school and are thus a captive audience for school-sponsored religious messages.”
The organizations say the law violates U.S. Supreme Court precedent in the 1980 Stone v. Graham decision. In a 5-4 ruling, the nation’s high court ruled against a similar law passed in Kentucky requiring classrooms to post copies of the Ten Commandments, concluding that it violated the First Amendment.
“The law violates the separation of church and state and is blatantly unconstitutional,” the groups wrote in a joint statement. “The First Amendment promises that we all get to decide for ourselves what religious beliefs, if any, to hold and practice, without pressure from the government. Politicians have no business imposing their preferred religious doctrine on students and families in public schools.”
Conversely, supporters of this law say that its purpose is to highlight the Ten Commandments as one of the “foundational documents of our state and national government.”
Under the bill, schools are also permitted to display other historical documents, such as the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, and the Northwest Ordinance.
“Although this is a religious document, this document is also posted in over one hundred and eighty places, including the Supreme Court of the United States of America. I would say it is based on the laws that this country was founded on,” Republican state Sen. Adam Bass told KALB last month.
Matt Krause, a lawyer with the religious liberty law firm First Liberty Institute, said the new law looks at “the history and tradition of the Ten Commandments in the state.”
“Putting this historic document on schoolhouse walls is a great way to remind students of the foundations of American and Louisiana law,” Krause, who testified in support of a similar bill in Ohio, stated. “First Liberty was grateful to play a part in helping this bill reach the Governor’s desk. We applaud Louisiana for being the first but by no means the last, state to take this bold step for religious liberty.”
Photo Credit: Getty Images/Marinela Malcheva
