By Will Hall
BATON ROUGE, La. (LBM) – Gov. Jeff Landry signed HB71 into law, June 19, making Louisiana the first state in the nation to restore the display of the Ten Commandments in its schools.
The legislation, which was authored by Rep. Dodie Horton, a member with First Baptist Church, Haughton, Louisiana, requires a poster or framed document of the Ten Commandments (“at least eleven inches by fourteen inches,” and in “large, easily readable font”) to be placed in every state-funded classroom, kindergarten through college, no later than Jan. 1, 2025.
The law uses a version of the Ten Commandments that is adapted from the King James Bible, and it requires the display to include a “context statement” about “The History of the Ten Commandments in American Public Education.” That mandated paragraph emphasizes “The Ten Commandments were a prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries,” beginning with the “The New England Primer,” the first published American textbook (1688). It served as a first-grade reader in U.S. public schools for nearly 150 years.
Horton, who successfully championed a law last year to allow the posting in schools of the national motto, “In God We Trust” (which received relatively little pushback), told the Baptist Message that she did not anticipate the extreme response that has erupted around the country.
“I just did not realize how vicious they would be at the thought of us being able to restore an emblem of faith in our schools,” Horton said. “I knew that they wouldn’t welcome it, but I did not realize how vicious they would become.
Four liberal political activist groups (American Civil Liberties Union, its Louisiana chapter, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and the Freedom from Religion Foundation) announced through a June 19 press release their intentions to file a lawsuit “to challenge a new Louisiana law that requires all public elementary, secondary, and postsecondary schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom.”
They cited Stone v. Graham, a 1980 Supreme Court ruling that used the “Lemon Test” (three questions used to determine whether a challenged state statute is permissible under the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution), to conclude a Kentucky “Ten Commandments” law was unconstitutional. The joint statement claimed that Louisiana’s law would result in “religious coercion” as well as “send a chilling message to [some] students and families … that they do not belong, and are not welcome, in our public schools.”
The four opponents to Louisiana’s new law, however, did not acknowledge that the U.S. Supreme Court, in 2019, formally invalidated the “Lemon Test” (in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, involving the “praying coach). Furthermore, they ruled that government cannot be hostile to religious expression.
Horton said the Ten Commandments “are in all statutes in one form or another,” calling the moral principles “a plumb line from which all our laws are derived.”
Moreover, she said, Louisiana’s Ten Commandments law was crafted specifically with respect to active Supreme Court precedents in order to pass judicial scrutiny moving forward.
Horton lamented that liberals have had so much “influence in our schools the last fifty or so years,” especially in removing God from the classroom.
“Our poor kids are being indoctrinated with so many false ideologies,” she said, pointing out the irony that the ACLU is suing Louisiana for wanting to display the moral code in the Ten Commandments at the same time it is suing Virginia to let teachers “transition children behind their parents’ backs.”
Regardless, Horton said, “I’m not asking schools to teach it, but to display it. Kids need to see who is actually telling them, ‘It’s not good to steal, to lie, to murder; and that it’s a good thing to honor and obey your parents.’
“If an educator or a child doesn’t like it, don’t look at it. These are the principles that founded our country, and we need to get back to our traditional values,” she added. “They’ll see that God gave these commandments to man.”
