Judge pushed enactment of law to display religious code until November in response to parents’ suit
Judge pushed enactment of law to display religious code until November in response to parents’ suit
A federal judge blocked Louisiana from posting the Ten Commandments in public schools until November after parents from five districts sued the state over the law.
In a brief ruling Friday, district court judge John deGravelles said that the parents and the state agreed that the Ten Commandments will not be posted in any public school classroom before 15 November. The state also agreed to not “promulgate advice, rules or regulations regarding proper implementation of the challenged statute”.
The state’s Republican governor, Jeff Landry, signed into law last month a bill that requires all classrooms, in K-12 public schools and colleges, to have Ten Commandments posters with “large, easily readable font”. The state is also requiring a four-paragraph “context statement” about how the commandments “were a prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries”.
Soon after the bill was signed, a coalition of parents, supported by the American Civil Liberties Union and other civil rights groups, sued the state saying the bill violates the first amendment.
The 250th anniversary of the signing of US declaration of independence will be in 2026.
The state is also requiring a four-paragraph “context statement” about how the commandments “were a prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries”.
If you start with the founding of Harvard in 1636 and go to SCOTUS deciding that laws requiring the 10 commandments in classrooms are unconstitutional in 1980, then you get almost 350 years.
Technically, that’s English, Dutch, French, and Spanish history, not to mention Native American history. And the Native Americans certainly were not influenced by Christianity, except for the part of it that killed the shit out of all of them.
I'm honestly really surprised that Catholics in this country aren't going apeshit about Louisiana mandating that the Protestant version of the Ten Commandments be displayed.
The Bible contains two summaries of the ten commandments. Unsurprisingly, what Louisiana wants to put up on a poster is not a literal translation of either of them. Catholics tend to use an interpretation that doesn’t include “no graven images.”
Note that there’s stuff in there for many Catholics to be unhappy about (carved images, taking the lord’s name in vain) and many protestants (telling children about adultery, observing the sabbath, not coveting, not bearing false witness).
But those commandments are a small part of the Jewish Mosaic law; Christians are supposed to override that with “love God” and “love the people around you, even those who your social clique shuns” along with “it’s not enough to not do the commandments; if you catch yourself contemplating breaking them in your head, stop doing it.”
There's also only one set of laws the Bible itself says are called the ten commandments and it's not either of those. In fact, it's the laws Moses wrote after getting pissed off at the idolaters and decided the first set weren't explicit enough about what his god did not want people to doing.
To make it clear: no yeast in blood sacrifices and don't boil a baby goat in its mothers milk. Or else.
(Note that the Old Testament doesn't really make it clear what the 'or else' is going to be in your own case, just that God is a big mean motherfucker and you don't want to get on his bad side.)
Is there a different version by the Catholic church? I thought they were all the same. Where is the Church of Satan in all this? Wouldn't this open up the door to posting other religious texts in schools as well?
The state’s Republican governor, Jeff Landry, signed into law last month a bill that requires all classrooms, in K-12 public schools and colleges, to have Ten Commandments posters with “large, easily readable font”.
Given that Louisiana is 47th in the country for education, it’d be laughable if it weren’t so sad that the governor’s only reading-based concerns are “can they read the Bible laws?”
If I was a teacher and these laws came into effect I'd be tempted to print out the biblical laws for owning slaves and put them right next to every spot the 10 commandments is posted. After all, why stop at just the 10 commandments?
Unfortunately, in the kind of states requiring these to be posted, adding the biblical laws for slavery would probably seen in a positive light by them.