Louisiana governor Jeff Landry (R.) signed a bill Wednesday requiring that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public-school classroom in the state, the only such mandate in the country.
The bill, introduced by state representative and Louisiana Freedom Caucus member Dodie Horton (R.), will take effect on January 1, 2025, at which point each school district in the state must create “a poster or framed document” with the text of the Ten Commandments “printed in a large, easily readable font.” Included in the legislation are arguments defending the “historical role of the Ten Commandments” and their importance to “the understanding of the founders of our nation with respect to the necessity of civic morality to a functional self-government.”
“If you want to respect the rule of law,” Landry said at a recent fundraiser, “you’ve got to start from the original law giver, which was Moses.”
Seemingly expecting a legal battle, the Louisiana governor said at that same event that he “can’t wait to be sued.”
Almost immediately after Landry signed the bill, the national American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), its Louisiana state chapter, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and the Freedom From Religion Foundation announced their intention to do just that.
“We are preparing a lawsuit to challenge H.B. 71. The law violates the separation of church and state and is blatantly unconstitutional. The First Amendment promises that we all get to decide for ourselves what religious beliefs, if any, to hold and practice, without pressure from the government. Politicians have no business imposing their preferred religious doctrine on students and families in public schools,” the groups wrote in a press statement.
A similar bill failed to pass through the Texas state house last year, meaning Louisiana has become the first state in the country to require the displaying of the Ten Commandments in classrooms since the 1980 Stone v. Graham Supreme Court ruling against an identical Kentucky statute. In his dissent in that case, then-Associate Justice William Rehnquist wrote that the Kentucky statute did not violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment because “the Ten Commandments have had a significant impact on the development of secular legal codes of the Western World” and that even though “the asserted secular purpose may overlap with what some may see as a religious objective does not render it unconstitutional.”