On Friday, The Washington Examiner posted an article about the new law in Louisiana requiring that a poster of the Ten Commandments be displayed in every classroom. The ‘separation of church and state’ hysteria was immediately triggered.
The article reports:
The response was predictable howling that the legislation violated the separation of church and state. The American Civil Liberties Union announced it would file a lawsuit against the new law and condemned it as “religious coercion.”
Landry, to his credit, declared he “can’t wait to be sued” and said if anyone wants to “respect the rule of law,” he must “start from the original law giver, which was Moses.”
The law seeks to overturn a 1980 Supreme Court precedent in Stone v. Graham, in which the court ruled that a similar statute in Kentucky violated the establishment clause of the Constitution. But as Justice William Rehnquist noted in his dissent, the Ten Commandments are not merely religious doctrine but the foundation for Western law.
“The Ten Commandments have had a significant impact on the development of secular legal codes of the Western world,” he wrote.
The article concludes:
At a time when a growing number of people are rejecting the basic moral truths that stealing is wrong, marital infidelity is wrong, and sometimes even that killing is wrong, the moral guidance of the Ten Commandments is needed more than ever.
If the ACLU has a problem with the Ten Commandments, it should sue to invalidate the long list of laws in force today that derive their moral foundation from the commands that God gave Moses at the top of Mt. Sinai, because clearly, any law informed by the Ten Commandments must violate the separation of church and state.
The headline of the article, “Louisiana rightly blends education and morality,” reminds us that moral education is a valuable part of education. It does no good to teach a child basic math and English skills if he does not have the moral education to use them wisely.
