By DR. CHRISTOPHER MANION
On June 19th, 2024, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry signed House Bill 71 into law mandating that the Ten Commandments be put on display in every classroom in the state’s public school classrooms by January 1, 2025.
Of course, the Ten Commandments were universally displayed in locations public and private before the cultural left’s attack on America’s religious character that has raged since the mid-twentieth century.
But the Decalogue departed from public schools years ago, and the American Civil Liberties Union wants to keep it that way. Just five days after Governor Landry signed HB 71, the ACLU filed a lawsuit against the State of Louisiana in Federal District Court.
The ACLU has followed this pattern literally hundreds of times in the past 75 years. The organization’s goal has been consistent: to reverse the Supreme Court’s 1892 unanimous decision which stated that “this is a religious nation” (Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States 143 US 457) and erase all traces of our religious character from American society and culture.
The plaintiffs in the Louisiana case, according to the ACLU, “assert that public schools’ display of an official, state-approved version of the Ten Commandments, which is associated with Protestant beliefs, impermissibly favors some faiths over others and will create an unwelcoming and religiously coercive school environment for children who do not subscribe to the state’s preferred version of scripture.”
Hardly a masterful attempt at confusion: behind the smoke and mirrors, the ACLU argues that to oppose lying, stealing, adultery, and murder is to espouse a “religious belief.” And that’s not to be permitted in the secular America that the ACLU seeks in its own version of the “Establishment Clause.”
The ACLU complaint continues: “Students exposed to this sectarian teaching will be irremediably harmed by being forced to confront it in the classrooms and hallways of their public schools every single day of their academic studies.”
Of course, the ACLU’s defense of LGBTX–ad-nauseam rights regarding public schools doesn’t “irremediably harm” students at all (for one of many examples, see Taylor Victor v. Manteca Unified School District [2015]). To point to the moral chaos that prevails in blue school districts like Fairfax County, Virginia, or Chicago, Illinois might powerfully indicate correlation, but it’s not fair, thank you, to invoke the law of cause and effect. Not in the least!
Stumbling Over “Stone”
The core of the ACLU’s case, however, rests on stare decisis — that is, precedent — specifically the case of Stone v. Graham, (449 U.S. 39 [1980]). In this case, the U.S. Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a Kentucky state law that required the posting of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. The law violated the Establishment Clause, the Court declared.
Of the Court’s majority — comprising Justices William J. Brennan Jr., Thurgood Marshall, Potter Stewart, Byron White, and John Paul Stevens, the first four had already voted for the revolutionary decision in Roe v. Wade seven years earlier. Their targeting of life and family was obdurate and proud: so they refused even to hear arguments on Kentucky the case, which brought a veritable roar of objections from the four dissenting justices (Warren E. Burger, Harry Blackmun, Lewis F. Powell Jr., and William H. Rehnquist).
“The Court’s summary rejection of a secular purpose articulated by the legislature and confirmed by the state court is without precedent in Establishment Clause jurisprudence,” wrote Justice Rehnquist, who adds the views of Justice Jackson, concurring in McCollum v. Board of Education, 333 U. S. 203 (1948):
“I think it remains to be demonstrated whether it is possible, even if desirable, to comply with such demands as plaintiff’s completely to isolate and cast out of secular education all that some people may reasonably regard as religious instruction. Perhaps subjects such as mathematics, physics or chemistry are, or can be, completely secularized. But it would not seem practical to teach either practice or appreciation of the arts if we are to forbid exposure of youth to any religious influences. Music without sacred music, architecture minus the cathedral, or painting without the scriptural themes would be eccentric and incomplete, even from a secular point of view. . . . I should suppose it is a proper, if not an indispensable, part of preparation for a worldly life to know the roles that religion and religions have played in the tragic story of mankind.”
Of course, the Marxist ideology embraced and adapted by today’s WOKE whackos considers religion and everything else that existed in the past or exists today to be evils that must be destroyed (Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, XI).
The Mess We’re In
In November 2024, a Federal District Court in Louisiana granted a preliminary injunction against the Ten Commandments law (Rev. Roake v. Brumley). Last week, three judges on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the lower court’s decision. Like Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization three years ago, this case will ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court, whose members will decide whether Stone v. Graham is a momentary blight in the annals of law, or whether it’s time to move on from “The Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” acknowledged as the basis of our liberties in the Declaration of Independence, whose 249th birthday we celebrate next week.
Of course, in the 1950’s students of my generation might have thought that the Ten Commandments forbade cheating on a test or lying about homework. Little did we know that, thanks to the Supreme Court, the next two generations would find no impediment in their public school education to instruct them not to massacre a bunch of their fellow students, send boys lurking into girls’ bathrooms, or lead a shoplifting gang through the streets of their hometown.
After all, who’s to tell them not to lie, cheat, or steal?
Well, that would be their parents, of course. But parents had a mountain to climb after the Court decided that schools could not require that the students recite a prayer at the beginning of the school day (Engel v. Vitale [1962]), and forbade mandatory Bible Reading and Prayer a year later (Abington School District v. Schempp [1963]).
Going back a couple of decades further, we find that even the recitation of the pledge of allegiance in public schools was an issue even during the height of the Second World War, when many of those kids had fathers who were fighting and both the Atlantic and the Pacific theaters (West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette [1943]).
Going back even further, we find California Superintendent of Schools, John Swett who in the 1860s founded the California Teachers Association. Swett, a Unitarian opposed parental control of local schools that allowed communities to hire their public school teachers on a year to year basis, and was notorious for his anti-Catholic bias in dealing with Catholic schools, many of which had existed for years because of the work of missionaries, decades, and even centuries before.
Today we confront national school union that are the richest, most widespread, and most radical political force in the country. It comes as no surprise, really, that. Randi Weingarten, the shrill and shallow-minded shrew who runs American Federation of Teachers, was recently revealed to be among the leadership of the Democrat national committee, which she departed in a half because it was not radical enough for her.
These are the same people who “teach our children,” as their bumper stickers profess. And when it comes to mountains that parents these days are required to climb, they are more rugged than those that hide nuclear weapons labs in Iran.
