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The Right Wing's New Plot to Force the Ten Commandments on Schoolkids
The Supreme Court has rebuffed these efforts before, but that was nearly a half-century ago. Today’s MAGA conservatives see a more favorable legal environment—and they might be right.
https://newrepublic.com/article/192942/louisiana-ten-commandments-schools-conservative-legal-plot
https://archive.ph/JvidI
In 1978, Kentucky picked a fight with the U.S. Constitution. The state enacted a law requiring that a “durable, permanent copy of the Ten Commandments shall be displayed on a wall in each public elementary and secondary school classroom.” While the law claimed this was a “secular application” of the Ten Commandments, the U.S. Supreme Court saw otherwise. The justices ruled that the display violated the establishment clause’s separation of church and state, noting that it “had no secular legislative purpose” and was “plainly religious in nature.”
That 1980 ruling, Stone v. Graham, has effectively been the law of land ever since, but conservatives never gave up on the goal of that Kentucky law. This year, there are similar efforts underway in no fewer than nine states—and it’s clear that they expect a different ruling this time around from a staunchly conservative Supreme Court. Backers of these bills claim that American history proves their case, but they don’t seem to know or care about the full story. Their ignorance is terrifying, because the last time America had laws like this, it led to bloody street battles that ripped our cities apart.
Louisiana took the lead last year, passing a law in June—to Donald Trump’s approval—that would have required a Ten Commandments in all public schools come January 1. The ACLU filed suit, and a federal judge blocked the law in November, calling it “unconstitutional on its face”—but the state attorney general in January nonetheless instructed schools to post the Ten Commandments. A three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals took it up later that month, and its decision is pending.
In that hearing, state Solicitor General Jorge Benjamin Aguiñaga argued in court that recent Supreme Court rulings had paved the way for more religion in public schools. In 2022’s Kennedy v. Bremerton, for example, the justices ruled that public school coaches were free to pray at school with their students. That was because, as Justice Neil Gorsuch put it in the majority opinion, “this Court has instructed that the Establishment Clause must be interpreted by ‘reference to historical practices and understandings,’” and he went on to cite a 1963 ruling stating that “the line we must draw between the permissible and the impermissible is one which accords with history and faithfully reflects the understanding of the Founding Fathers.”
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