Louisiana Is The 1st State To Indoctrinate Students By Requiring The Ten Commandments In Public Schools

Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry Source: Pacific Press / Getty

Welp, it has happened. The First Amendment of the American Constitution be damned. Louisiana is officially the first state in U.S. history to require by law that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school in the state from kindergarten through college. Another way of putting that is that Louisiana is the first state to make it against the law not to practice religious indoctrination in the classroom.

According to the Associated Press, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed into law Wednesday the requirement that a poster-sized display of the Ten Commandments in “large, easily readable font” be placed in every single state-funded classroom in the state, and he’s justifying the legislation by lying to the easily lied to and suggesting that the very concept of law was borne through Christianity.

“If you want to respect the rule of law, you’ve got to start from the original lawgiver, which was Moses” who got the commandments from God,” Landry said.

As we previously reported, the bill’s sponsor, state Rep. Dodie Horton, claimed prior to the bill’s passing that the Ten Commandments are rooted in legal history and that plastering them all over every public institution of learning in the state would effectively place a “moral code” in the classroom.

Here’s what I wrote about that:

Get TF outta here with this nonsense about the Ten Commandments being “rooted in legal history,” and about the display being about “moral code” and not explicit religious indoctrination. In fact, let’s just take a quick look at this so-called “code.”

First, it’s not really clear what the practical value is of displaying for students biblical instructions not to kill and steal, as it is common knowledge that these are crimes. I suppose it does somewhat justify the “legal history” aspect, but they might as well require classrooms to display the adage, “Play with fire, you will get burned” since we’re creating entire legally-binding bills just to state the obvious.

But beyond that, what’s the “moral” value of instructing students to “have no other Gods before” the chosen Christian God, to “not make unto thee any graven images,” to “not take the name of Lord thy God in vain,” and to “remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy?” What does any of that have to do with the “moral code” of someone who is not a worshiper of the Christian faith?

The Louisiana GOP could have found sound moral advice from the texts of a myriad of religious and/or spiritual groups, but they chose the doctrine of their preferred religion—America’s most dominant religion—and a list of rules, nearly half of which can’t really be applied to non-Cristians. That’s not about morals, it’s about forced proselytizing in public schools.

The post Louisiana Is The 1st State To Indoctrinate Students By Requiring The Ten Commandments In Public Schools appeared first on NewsOne.

Read more