Louisiana will be the first state to require poster-sized displays of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. In a further encroachment of religion into secular life and education, the Pelican State’s legislature approved a bill to install large displays of the Decalogue in every public classroom, from kindergarten to state-funded universities. Gov. Jeff Landry is expected to sign it into law.

However, this decision is not without its potential legal hurdles. Similar measures in Texas, Oklahoma, and Utah were thwarted by legal challenges, a fate that could await Louisiana’s bill. The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1980 ruling, which deemed a similar Kentucky law unconstitutional and overtly religious, also poses a significant obstacle.

Advocates of the law argue that, unlike Kentucky, their intent is not purely religious. On May 28, State Sen. Jay Morris said, “The purpose is not solely religious to have the Ten Commandments displayed in our schools, but rather its historical significance.” He said the Ten Commandments are “simply one of many documents that display the history of our country and the foundation for our legal system.”

The wording of the Louisiana bill reinforces its legitimacy by enlisting the endorsement of no less a personage than the Father of the Constitution, James Madison: “History records that James Madison, the fourth President of the United States of America, stated that ‘(w)e have staked the whole future of our new nation … upon the capacity of each of ourselves to govern ourselves according to the moral principles of the Ten Commandments.’”

The Madison quote, however, is a hoax. The only history that can be found recording it is whole cloth, dating back to a 1992 propagandizing book, The Myth of Separation. Madison never uttered or wrote any such thing and likely would have been horrified to be represented as having done so. What Madison did do was strenuously advocate, in writing, “the total separation of the Church from State” (1819) and in a memo penned after his presidency, warned about efforts to wear that separation down: “Strongly guarded as is the separation between Religion & Govt in the Constitution of the United States the danger of encroachment by Ecclesiastical Bodies, may be illustrated by precedents already furnished in their short history.”

Opposing the new law, state Sen. Royce Duplessis argued that the historical significance justification doesn’t give Louisiana “constitutional cover” on its legitimacy. Saying there are many more “documents that are historical in nature,” the lawmaker added, “I was raised Catholic and I still am a practicing Catholic, but I didn’t have to learn the Ten Commandments in school. It is why we have church. If you want your kids to learn about the Ten Commandments, take them to church.”

“We really need to be teaching our kids how to become literate, to be able to actually read the Ten Commandments that we’re talking about posting. I think that should be the focus and not this big what I would consider a divisive bill,” Duplessis said. Louisiana currently ranks 41^st out of the 50 states in K-12 education, and as of the fall of 2022, only half of its K-3 students were reading at their grade level.

Photo credits: NWomen’s March 1403 by Edward Kimmel from Takoma Park, MD, CC BY-SA 2.0.