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Louisiana passes into law that the Ten Commandments must be posted in all school classrooms

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BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Louisiana has become the first state to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom under a bill signed into law by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry on Wednesday.

The GOP-drafted legislation mandates that a poster-sized display of the Ten Commandments in “large, easily readable font” be required in all public classrooms, from kindergarten to state-funded universities. Although the bill did not receive final approval from Landry, the time for gubernatorial action — to sign or veto the bill — has lapsed.

Opponents question the law’s constitutionality, warning that lawsuits are likely to follow. Proponents say the purpose of the measure is not solely religious, but that it has historical significance. In the law’s language, the Ten Commandments are described as “foundational documents of our state and national government.”

The displays, which will be paired with a four-paragraph “context statement” describing how the Ten Commandments “were a prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries,” must be in place in classrooms by the start of 2025.

The posters would be paid for through donations. State funds will not be used to implement the mandate, based on language in the legislation.

The law also “authorizes” — but does not require — the display of the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence and the Northwest Ordinance in K-12 public schools.

Similar bills requiring the Ten Commandments be displayed in classrooms have been proposed in other states including Texas, Oklahoma and Utah. However, with threats of legal battles over the constitutionality of such measures, no state besides Louisiana has had success in making the bills law.

Legal battles over the display of the Ten Commandments in classrooms are not new.

In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a similar Kentucky law was unconstitutional and violated the establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution, which says Congress can “make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” The high court found that the law had no secular purpose but rather served a plainly religious purpose.

Louisiana’s controversial law, in a state ensconced in the Bible Belt, comes during a new era of conservative leadership in the state under Landry, who replaced two-term Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards in January.

The GOP also has a two-thirds supermajority in the Legislature, and Republicans hold every statewide elected position, paving the way for lawmakers to push through a conservative agenda during the legislative session that concluded earlier this month.

87 comments

  • This is blatantly unconstitutional,not that that actually has any real meaning, but either way I can’t wait to troll some “small c conservatives” with this.

    • Even with the conservative tilt of the court, there’s no way this survives a legal challenge. It just opens up too many cans of worms to allow any religion’s holy text to be displayed on public. Cultural conservatives balk at the idea of opening that up to Jews, Muslims, etc., and the true powers that be see the religious stuff as bread and circuses for the rubes.

  • under a bill signed into law by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry on Wednesday.

    Although the bill did not receive final approval from Landry, the time for gubernatorial action — to sign or veto the bill — has lapsed.

    Did he sign it or not, sara??

    (it has since been edited to show that he did actually sign the bill)

  • If they're gonna put the Ten Commandments in schools, they also have to include all those rules from the same books about which colour bugs you're allowed to eat and how to properly bathe your mother-in-law. Anything less will probably incur God's wrath.

  • It's a shame a lot of the NuAtheists ended up breaking right because I can relate with wanting to irritate the shit out of these people at every possible opportunity

    • Me and the other (former) nu atheists I know are all commies now

      • Yeah, it's interesting. I was just kind of a RationalWiki type then so I already kind of broke left, mostly just seems like it's some of the bigger figures that broke right?

        I hear TJ ended up leaning more into the left politics. Not sure about that, though, haven't really thought of the guy in a while.

  • It used to be you could stop this by getting the Catholics and Protestants to fight each other over which God the state would sponsor. Now that's moot eversince they merged. American Catholics are just Protestants now and American Protestants rely on Catholic apologists to be their intellectuals.

  • Damn it's not even the good ten commandments

    1. Of the tinctures, only the metals {Or|gold} and {Argent|silver}, and the colors {Gules|red}, {Azure|blue}, {Sable|black}, and {Vert|green} may be used; Or and Argent may be depicted as yellow and white respectively; the tinctures are to be bright and clean; the tones are to be picked from center of the scale.
    2. The use of only two tinctures, one metal and one color, is preferred, but a third tincture is permissible with good reasons; a fourth tincture is always forbidden.
    3. There shall be no color on or next to color, nor metal on or next to metal unless the line of contact is very short.
    4. The arms may not be charged with lettering or numerals, nor any other text.
    5. The charges must be as big as possible and fill the space intended for them as completely as possible.
    6. The charges should be drawn to emphasize their characteristics rather than their appearance in the natural world: the lion fierce, the eagle majestic, the deer graceful.
    7. The charges are to be two-dimensional; they must at least remain recognizable even when presented as silhouettes without shading or lines.
    8. The arms must be easy to remember, with only the essential symbolism, ideally only one charge.
    9. Repetition is forbidden: one idea should not be represented with multiple charges, and if one charge can represent multiple ideas, then that only strengthens the symbolism of that charge and indeed the arms as a whole.
    10. The blazon of a charge must not require the usage of a proper noun: charges are in other words a general representation of the common noun in the blazon, such that the arms may be drawn from the blazon without the need of a model.

  • If it was historical it would be in French.

    • Why French and not like whatever language the old testament was originally in

      • Because they are making the argument that it is historical with regards to the state, and historically Christianity in Louisiana was either French or Spanish Catholicism. Baton Rogue specifically was French.

      • Why French and not like whatever language the old testament was originally in

        Short answer is we know it was Hebrew, but we don't know what kind of Hebrew, because the Hebrew language changed over time.

        On the basis of a variety of arguments, modern secular scholars generally see the completed Torah as a product of the time of the Persian Achaemenid Empire (probably 450–350 BCE). The absence of archaeological evidence for the Exodus narrative, and the evidence pointing to anachronisms in the patriarchal narratives of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, have convinced the vast majority of scholars that the Torah does not give an accurate account of the origins of Israel.This implies that the Torah could not have been written by Moses during the second millennium BCE, as Jewish tradition teaches. It is generally agreed that Classical Hebrew and Late Biblical Hebrew had distinctive, identifiable features and that Classical Hebrew was earlier. Classical Hebrew is usually dated to the period before the Babylonian captivity (597–539 BCE), while Late Biblical Hebrew is generally dated to the exilic and post-exilic periods. However, it is difficult to determine precisely when Classical Hebrew ceased being used, since there are no extant Hebrew inscriptions of substantial length dating from the relevant period (c. 550–200 BCE). Another methodological difficulty with linguistic dating is that it is known that the biblical authors often intentionally used archaisms for stylistic effects, sometimes mixing them with words and constructions from later periods. This means that the presence of archaic language in a text cannot be considered definitive proof that the text dates to an early period.

87 comments