The Louisiana Senate just passed House Bill 71 (2024), which requires the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public schools.
Which is similar to Utah's bill passed just recently.
However, unlike Utah, Louisiana takes it a step further and requires the Ten Commandments to be posted in every single classroom.
Many senators hemmed and hawed about the nature of the bill, and its significance.
'The purpose is not solely religious,' Sen. J. Adam Bass, R-Bossier City, told the Senate. Rather, it is the Ten Commandments' 'historical significance, which is simply one of many documents that display the history of our country and foundation of our legal system.'
However, the bill's author - the honorable, absolutely based, Senator Dodie Horton - didn't pull her punches:
'I'm not concerned with an atheist. I'm not concerned with a Muslim,' she said when asked about teachers who might not subscribe to the Ten Commandments. 'I'm concerned with our children looking and seeing what God's law is.'
The Left is all pumped up about the court cases that will throw this law out, but I suspect they may be on the losing side of that fight.
Here's why.
The moral decay of U.S. schools can be traced to a series of Supreme Court cases starting in 1962 with Engel v. Vitale (1962), where they ended prayer in public schools. That case was followed by Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971), which created the Lemon test of whether a state action was sufficiently separate from religion or violated the First Amendment's establishment of religion clause.
The Lemon Test was used to undermine Christianity in public schools at every turn, and only Christianity (but that's a whole different article).
One relevant example to the Louisiana bill is Stone v. Graham (1980), in which the Supreme Court used the Lemon Test to decide that the Ten Commandments could not be displayed in public school classrooms.
And if that were the end of the story, then the Left would win. (They certainly have for the last 60 years).
However, in a recent case we've covered in depth, the Supreme Court blasted the Lemon Test.
In Kennedy vs. Bremerton School District (2022), Justice Gorsuch wrote,
But — given the apparent "shortcomings" associated with Lemon's 'ambitiou[s],' abstract, and ahistorical approach to the Establishment Clause — this Court long ago abandoned Lemon and its endorsement test offshoot.
In place of Lemon and the endorsement test, this Court has instructed that the Establishment Clause must be interpreted by ‘reference to historical practices and understandings.'
And in her dissent, Justice Sotomayor wrote,
Today's decision goes beyond merely misreading the record. The Court overrules Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971), and calls into question decades of subsequent precedents that it deems "offshoot[s]" of that decision.
While the majority did not go so far as to directly overrule Lemon, it would be difficult to not read this as the introduction of a new establishment test, one based on history and tradition.
Historically and traditionally, at the time of the writing of the First Amendment, the Ten Commandments would have been on every classroom wall, the Bible would have been read in schools, and teachers and students would have prayed during class time.
Lord willing, Louisiana's testing of the waters will prove an able fortification for the fight ahead.
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