Mr. Jeff Landry, the Louisiana’s Republican governor | File Image
The posters must be on display in all classrooms receiving state funding by 2025 – but no state funding is being offered to pay for the posters themselves
By Valentine Amanze
The U.S. state of Louisiana has made the display of the Ten Commandements compulsory in all the public schools’ classroom in the state.
This is coming at the time of intense politicking for the forthcoming U.S. presidential election.
Mr. Jeff Landry, the Louisiana’s Republican governor, signed the law on Wednesday June 19, 2024 even as the civil liberties groups said that they would challenge the new law.
The Republican-backed measure is the first of its kind in the U.S., and governs all classrooms up to university level.
Governor Jeff Landry signed it off on Wednesday, while Christians discribe the Ten Commandments as key rules from God on how to live.
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But opponents say the law breaks America’s separation of church and state.
Recall that he first amendment to the U.S. Constitution, known as the Establishment Clause, says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
The state law requires that a poster include the sacred text in “large, easily readable font” on a poster that is 11 inches by 14 inches (28cm by 35.5cm) and that the commandments be “the central focus” of the display.
The commandments will also be shown alongside a four-paragraph “context statement” which will describe how the directives “were a prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries”.
The posters must be on display in all classrooms receiving state funding by 2025 – but no state funding is being offered to pay for the posters themselves.
Similar laws have recently been proposed by other Republican-led states, including Texas, Oklahoma and Utah.
Meanwhile, four civil liberties groups have confirmed that they plan a legal challenge, highlighting the religious diversity of Louisiana’s schools.
The law was “blatantly unconstitutional”, said a joint statement from the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and the Freedom from Religion Foundation.
But the bill’s author, Republican state lawmaker, Dodie Horton, has spoken of the importance of returning a “moral code” to classrooms. She was quoted saying, “it’s like hope is in the air everywhere” as the bill was rubber-stamped by the governor.
In 1980, the US Supreme Court struck down a similar Kentucky law requiring that the document be displayed in elementary and high schools.
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