Photo by Joshua Hoehne, Unsplash
Photo by Joshua Hoehne, Unsplash
The fundamentalist Christians who wrote the laws enforcing the Ten Commandments in Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas are not confident about their own faith. That’s why they want to force their religion on the rest of us.
Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV
A federal district court in Texas ruled today that the law requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in every school room in the state is unconstitutional and suspended the requirement in the 11 school districts involved in the lawsuit.
Texas is the third state that has attempted to shove the Ten Commandments down the throats of school children. A similar law in Arkansas was held to be unconstitutional earlier this month, and last year, a nearly identical law in Louisiana was suspended by a district court judge. That decision was upheld by a unanimous three-judge panel of the arch-conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans which ruled that the Louisiana law was “plainly unconstitutional” and upheld the lower federal court’s decision to block the law.
So, that’s the good news. There are still some federal district and courts of appeals judges who can read the plain language of the First Amendment forbidding the “establishment of religion” by the government.
The bad news is that there is a huge force of fundamentalist Christians in this country who will continue to push their religion, and their interpretation of Christianity, on their fellow citizens. For this brand of Christians, it’s not enough that Christian churches dot the landscape of this country in every state and practically every county, and their doors are open to anyone who wants to enter and join them in worship. That is insufficient for these fanatics. They want their religion to be mandatory, which placement of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms accomplishes.
The Texas law requires the display of the Ten Commandments on a poster at least 16 inches wide and 20 inches tall. The Texas law requires schools to accept donations of the posters and allows the expenditure of public funds to pay for the Ten Commandment posters if donations are not available.
If that is not state establishment of religion, specifically the Christian religion, I don’t know what is. Sixteen families of school children filed the lawsuit in Texas. They made the point that the language in the Ten Commandments mandated by the state came from the King James Bible, and no other language was permitted. The families came from different faiths, including Judaism and other faiths that are not Christian. The Texas law created no mechanism for the text of a document coming from any other faith to be posted in school rooms, making Christianity the only approved religious faith in Texas schools.
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Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives in rural Pennsylvania and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better.
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