Every Single Public School Classroom in Louisiana Must Now Display the Ten Commandments

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Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry signed off on a new law this week requiring all public and state-funded schools to post visible displays of the “Ten Commandments,” making Louisiana the first U.S. state to enact such a policy.

Landry, a Republican, signed House Bill 71 into law on Wednesday, after it passed through the House by a 79-16 vote late last month. The law, which takes effect immediately, requires all public schools and private educational institutions that receive government funding to post displays of the Ten Commandments in all classrooms and office buildings. It also mandates specific language that should be used for each commandment, and even requires schools to use a specific paper size for their displays — no less than 11 by 14 inches — and to ensure the text is “the central focus of the poster” and “printed in a large, easily readable font.” (We’re sure they’ll make an exception for Papyrus.)

Louisiana is now the only U.S. state to require its schools to display the Ten Commandments, although Mississippi has required state schools to post the motto “In God We Trust” since 2001, as the Associated Press noted this week. Louisiana matched that requirement last year as well.

HB 71 was authored by GOP Rep. Dodie Horton, who first took office in 2015. Horton is also the chief sponsor of HB 122, which passed through both chambers of the state legislature last month and awaits Landry’s signature. That bill would bar teachers in K-12 schools from discussing sexual orientation or gender with students under most circumstances. Horton first tried to pass that bill in 2022, unsuccessfully.

During debate on HB 71 in April, Horton openly expressed her desire to introduce more conservative Christian ideas into state law, as the Times-Picayune first noted.

“I'm not concerned with an atheist. I'm not concerned with a Muslim,” Horton said, referring to teachers who are not Christian. “I'm concerned with our children looking and seeing what God's law is.”

But Horton’s rhetoric seems mismatched with that of other Republicans, like Sen. J. Adam Bass, who insisted the bill’s purpose was “not solely religious” during debate, according to the Times-Picayune. The commandments, Bass argued, carry “historical significance” to the U.S. as “one of many documents that display the history of our country and foundation of our legal system.”

Bass may be attempting to establish a legal defense for HB 71 ahead of time, with little assistance from Horton. The bill’s text itself does not mention a purpose for its mandate, but determining such a purpose — either secular, or wholly religious — is the first part of the Supreme Court’s three-pronged test for whether a law violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, which prohibits the government from establishing religion (often thought of as requiring the separation of church and state). In the landmark 1980 decision Stone v Graham, the Court overturned a similar law requiring the Ten Commandments be displayed in schools, because “[t]he pre-eminent purpose for posting the Ten Commandments on schoolroom walls is plainly religious in nature.” The architects of that law had included its “avowed” purpose of recognizing the Ten Commandments as the “fundamental legal code of Western Civilization,” much as Bass and other Republicans argue today. But the Court held that even an avowal of secular purpose was “not sufficient to avoid conflict with the First Amendment,” and that any posting of the Ten Commandments was “plainly religious in nature.”

Republicans have long argued that the U.S. was founded on “Judeo-Christian values,” a popular myth that has found its way into other bills and behind-the-scenes conservative policies. In 2023, the Florida Department of Education sponsored teacher trainings on “Influences of the Judeo-Christian Tradition” in U.S. legal history, which pushed numerous Christian nationalist talking points — including the myth that U.S. laws are based on the Ten Commandments — with the goal of “dispelling the separation of church and state.”

The rules would extend anti-discrimination protections to include queer, trans, and intersex people.

On Wednesday, the same day Landry signed HB 71 into law, representatives for the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Louisiana, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and the Freedom from Religion Foundation announced they would file a challenge to the law in a joint statement.

“The displays mandated by HB 71 will result in unconstitutional religious coercion of students, who are legally required to attend school and are thus a captive audience for school-sponsored religious messages,” the groups wrote in the statement. “Even among those who may believe in some version of the Ten Commandments, the particular text that they adhere to can differ by religious denomination or tradition. The government should not be taking sides in this theological debate, and it certainly should not be coercing students to submit day in and day out to unavoidable promotions of religious doctrine.”

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