One year ago this week, Republicans in Louisiana approved a new law with a dubious mandate: Every public school classroom in the state, from kindergarten to state-funded universities, had to display a poster of the Protestant version of the Ten Commandments in a “large, easily readable font.”
Soon after signing the proposal into law, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry bragged about the measure at a fundraiser, declaring, “I can’t wait to be sued.” He got his wish — and at least for now, he has lost. As NBC News reported, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals blocked the state law from taking effect, unanimously ruling that Louisiana’s state-sponsored-religion law was “facially unconstitutional.”
One day later, Greg Abbott, Texas’ Republican governor, signed into law a related measure to do basically the same thing. The Texas Tribune reported:
Come September, every public school classroom will be required to display the Ten Commandments — part of a larger push in Texas and beyond to increase the role of religion in schools. On Saturday, Gov. Greg Abbott signed Senate Bill 10, despite a federal court ruling that a similar Louisiana law violated a constitutionally required separation of church and state.
In case this isn’t obvious, Texas falls under the jurisdiction of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. The governor ignored the ruling anyway, less than 24 hours after a relevant decision reached the public.
Time will tell whether the U.S. Supreme Court agrees to hear an appeal of the Louisiana case, but in the interim, it’s worth appreciating why policies like these are legal, political and theological messes.
For example, Protestants, Jews and Catholics each honor the commandments, but the different faith traditions number and word the Decalogue in different ways. It’s not the job of politicians in state government to choose which version, if any, deserves an official endorsement to be imposed on public school children.
The legal dimension to this is every bit as jarring. Indeed, as regular readers might recall, when officials in Kentucky approved a very similar law nearly a half-century ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1980 that Ten Commandments displays in public schools were unconstitutional.
The Decalogue, the justices ruled in Stone v. Graham, is “undeniably a sacred text in the Jewish and Christian faiths” and displaying them “serves no … educational function.”
So why would Republicans in several states — most notably Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas — take a step that the Supreme Court has already rejected? It’s probably because they’re confident that the newly politicized high court and its dominant far-right majority will simply overturn the Stone precedent, doing fresh harm to the wall that’s supposed to separate church and state in this country. These GOP officials are almost certainly aware of the First Amendment, just as they’re almost certainly aware of the Supreme Court precedent that says they cannot legally do what they’re trying to do. But since the high court has moved sharply to the right over the course of the last 45 years, Abbott and others are counting on Republican-appointed justices to clear the way for more government-imposed religion in public schools. Watch this space. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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