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Louisiana codifies the next step in Christian Supremacy with the 10 Commandments in School [1]

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Date: 2024-06-21  

So, Louisiana has now passed a law requiring that the Ten Commandments be posted in each and every classroom from Kindergarten to State Colleges. And these people deny that this is a direct violation of the Establishment Clause and the separation of Church and State with a straight face.

This led to a dramatic confrontation between CNN’s Boris Sanchez and Louisiana State Representative Lauren Ventrella.

x x YouTube Video First off, the version of the Ten Commandments that is now required by law to be displayed happens to be the version favored by Protestants. (via Cecil B. Demile.) Catholics have a different version. Episcopalians have a slightly different version. Baptists have a different version. Jews have a different version.

This law excludes all of these different religions, all of them are being placed in a subordinate position to that which is specifically endorsed by the State.

There’s also the fact that the first four commandments are specifically about religion and God.

You shall have no other Gods before me. You shall not make for yourselves an idol. You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God. Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.

Are any of these about morality? Are any of these about abiding by the law? How do any of these help society function better?

There isn’t even an agreement between Judaism, Christianity and Islam on which day is the Sabbath. Jews celebrate it on Saturday, Christians on Sunday and Muslims have a “day of assembly” on Friday, instead of a outright Sabbath. Which one is correct? Which day are we keeping holy?

At one point in their discussion after Boris asks repeatedly how this will impact people of other faiths such as Buddism and Hinduism, and then Rep. Ventrella gives the most amazing answer.

“They don’t have to look at it.”

Say what now?

It’s going to be in every classroom. At every grade. How exactly are they going they not be able to notice it? Public schools are provided by the government. It’s the primary way that most people interact with their government — besides police and courts. How are they going to not feel like the government is specifically endorsing Protestantism?

The projection by these people is literally off the charts. x Boebert, whose son is facing 22 theft related charges after breaking into cars and stealing credit cards, says the Left opposes putting the 10 Commandments in school because they don’t want children to be taught that it’s bad to steal things. pic.twitter.com/09ruHhZaFc — Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) June 21, 2024 x Lauren Boebert, who married a pedophile, gave a handjob in a theater full of kids, & whose son knocked up a 15-year-old & faces a slew of felony charges, said “we need morals back in our nation” on convicted felon Steve Bannon’s show. Yup, that happened. 🤦‍♂️pic.twitter.com/fk7juUhx0l — 😱 Scary Larry 😱 🇺🇦✊🏻🇺🇸🗽 (@aintscarylarry) June 21, 2024 x Matt Gaetz and Bobo seem like the perfect match. pic.twitter.com/NuQkMCI2Xn — PaulleyTicks (@PaulleyTicks) June 19, 2024 x GOP Rep. Tony Gonzales: “I serve with some real scumbags. Matt Gaetz, he paid minors to have sex with him at drug parties.”

(April 2024)

pic.twitter.com/Z50B6lfgKs — Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) June 19, 2024 They have no moral compass, they have no idea of what is right and what is wrong — but they deign to preach to the rest of us? Not that shockingly, Trump is all-in with this new law. While President Joe Biden, a practicing Catholic, has remained silent about Louisiana’s new law mandating the Ten Commandments be displayed in all public school and state-funded university classrooms, former President Donald Trump has embraced the legislation. The first-in-the-nation law was signed by Gov. Jeff Landry (R-LA) on Wednesday. “I LOVE THE TEN COMMANDMENTS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS, PRIVATE SCHOOLS, AND MANY OTHER PLACES, FOR THAT MATTER,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “READ IT — HOW CAN WE, AS A NATION, GO WRONG??? THIS MAY BE, IN FACT, THE FIRST MAJOR STEP IN THE REVIVAL OF RELIGION, WHICH IS DESPERATELY NEEDED IN OUR COUNTRY.” The law is the latest skirmish in the culture war playing out in schools, following arguments about how and when teachers can teach students about gender ideology, LGBTQ matters, and critical race theory. Yeah, that figures. Remind me how the guy found liable for persistent business fraud, running a fraudulent charity, running a fraudulent “Trump Univesity”, found liable for defamation as well as being convicted for 34 counts of falsifed documents — who cheated on his first wife with his second, cheated on his second wife with his third, cheat on her with a Playboy Playmate, then cheated on her with a Porn Star — really truly believes in “Thou shalt not lie", "Thou shalt not steal” and also “Thou shalt not commit Adultery.” Let’s recall that Louisiana, which is my family’s home state — and Mike Johnson is the representative from our home city, Shreveport — has also passed their own “Don’t Say Gay” law for public schools.

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — A bill that would broadly ban K-12 public school employees in Louisiana from discussing sexual orientation or gender identity in the classroom is nearing final passage after securing the endorsement of a key Senate committee Thursday. Louisiana’s legislation, which already passed the House and advanced from the Senate Committee on Education to the GOP-dominated Senate floor on Thursday, is similar to a law enacted in Florida last year that critics dubbed, “Don’t Say Gay.” Florida’s law bars instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in all grades unless required by existing state standards or as part of reproductive health instruction that students can choose not to take. As of March, at least 30 proposals similar to Florida’s law were filed in 16 states. At least three other states — Alabama, Arkansas and Kentucky — have enacted similar “Don’t Say Gay” laws. “This is a hateful piece of legislation,” state Public Service Commissioner Devante Lewis, Louisiana’s first openly gay elected state official, told the Republican-controlled Senate committee. Opponents of Louisiana’s bill argue that it constitutes a targeted attack on the LGBTQ+ community. They note it comes during a year in wihch conservatives around the country have filed measures taking aim at nearly every facet of transgender existence, from health care to athletics to bathroom access. Additionally, the critics say that instead of protecting students, the legislation would harm an already vulnerable community, as research suggests transgender children and adults face heightened risks of stress, depression and suicidal thoughts.

So when it comes to being Gay, this state says it can’t be discussed. It’s not a subject for public education. They can’t talk about science, they can’t talk about orientation, they can’t talk about gender, and they certainly can’t display a Pride Flag in a classroom.

Why doesn’t someone tell Rep. Ventrella… “Just don’t look at it.”

Why would you care if it doesn’t address you? Why would you insist on insulting Non-Gay people by flying a flag that is so upsetting to them?

How Dare You!

But posting a religious text — where almost half of it is specifically religious — is supposedly no problem at all?

There’s a reason why the Founders of this nation didn’t want a specific religion endorsed by the Government. First off, not all of them were Christians. Many of them were Deists.

Ethan Allen, John Adams, James Monroe, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Payne were essentially Deists, as reportedly were Franklin and Madison, while Samuel Adams, John Jay, Elias Boudinot and Patrick Henry were Orthodox and Evangelicals.

Nearly all of them who were English had experience with the Church of England, which very seriously was a State and Government based religion started by King Henry VIII when he wanted to get a divorce and the Catholic Church wouldn’t let him. (Though shalt not commit Adultery).

So he made his own Church with himself as the head of it.

After that, the Church of England implemented, using governmental power, a lot of policies against and persecution of Catholics.

So there’s a history here. There was a point in time where the Catholic Church split and there were Two Popes, each choosing to completely excommunicate the followers of the other.

Besides these various problems, there was also the Inquisition and the Crusades.

And there was also the persecution of more minority Christian sects such as the Quakers and Puritans.

Quakers were severely persecuted in England for daring to deviate so far from orthodox Christianity. By 1680, 10,000 Quakers had been imprisoned in England, and 243 had died of torture and mistreatment in the King's jails.

It was that persecution that led many from those sects to leave Europe and England and seek out the New Lands here in America.

Puritans were English Protestants who wished to reform and purify the Church of England of what they considered to be unacceptable residues of Roman Catholicism. In the 1620s leaders of the English state and church grew increasingly unsympathetic to Puritan demands. They insisted that the Puritans conform to religious practices that they abhorred, removing their ministers from office and threatening them with "extirpation from the earth" if they did not fall in line. Zealous Puritan laymen received savage punishments. For example, in 1630 a man was sentenced to life imprisonment, had his property confiscated, his nose slit, an ear cut off, and his forehead branded "S.S." (sower of sedition). Beginning in 1630 as many as 20,000 Puritans emigrated to America from England to gain the liberty to worship God as they chose. Most settled in New England, but some went as far as the West Indies. Theologically, the Puritans were "non-separating Congregationalists." Unlike the Pilgrims, who came to Massachusetts in 1620, the Puritans believed that the Church of England was a true church, though in need of major reforms. Every New England Congregational church was considered an independent entity, beholden to no hierarchy. The membership was composed, at least initially, of men and women who had undergone a conversion experience and could prove it to other members. Puritan leaders hoped (futilely, as it turned out) that, once their experiment was successful, England would imitate it by instituting a church order modeled after the New England Way.

Religious exiles are the people who formed this nation. They were run out of Europe on a pike for being insufficiently “pure” in their religious persuasion.

This why there is a clause that says “The Congress shall make no law to Establish Religion” in our Constitution. It can because dangerous for the government to take sides in favor of a single religious doctrine to anyone else who doesn’t follow that doctrine. It can be used to coerce and intimidate. It can be used to persecute.

Just as religion can be used to persecute LGBTQ persons.

In recent years, the LGBT rights movement has witnessed a sea change in American attitudes toward the gay community and, along with it, a series of dramatic policy and legal victories — most notably marriage equality — that would have seemed unthinkable just a decade ago. Yet, while the majority of Americans support LGBT rights, these gains have produced a strong backlash. The hardline religious-right groups that have long relied on the use of demonizing falsehoods to justify discrimination against LGBT people have not simply folded their tents and walked away. Rather, they have used their large megaphone to create a dangerous new narrative that portrays Christians who object to homosexuality on biblical grounds as victims of religious persecution. This idea is particularly compelling to millions of evangelicals who see themselves and their values as being under siege in a rapidly changing society. Across the country, these opponents of LGBT equality are working to persuade state legislatures to pass laws known as Religious Freedom Restoration Acts (RFRAs) — statutes that ostensibly allow individuals to deny goods and services to LGBT people on the basis of their religious beliefs.

So in Louisiana, they’ve managed to purge being openly LGBTQ from the schools.

yay.

Now they’re coming for you not-quite-right-enough-Christians - the Baptists, the Methodists and the Mormons. Don’t be blind. They’re also coming for the Jews, the Muslims, the Hindus and the Buddhists. And Lord Help the Atheists.

How dare you believe something different? How dare you have a different set of the Ten Commandments? How dare you have a different Sabbath day?

This is a Christian Protestant Supremacist movement. They’re taking ownership of our common public spaces inch-by-inch, and they’re planting their Flag — probably the “Appeal to Heaven” Flag — right in the middle of public ground.

They think they deserve to be dominant, even when less than half of Americans (47%) consider themselves “Religious.” and only 34% consider themselves Protestant. They think they’re a majority - when frankly, everyone else are the majority.

Next comes School prayer. Then comes Bible study in public schools. Then full-on religious indoctrination. They’ve already started in Florida.

In 2022, Florida began indoctrinating public school teachers with Christian Nationalism in the hopes that they would spread the misinformation to their students. In 2023, new evidence shows, they kept doing it. Thousands of teachers have now gone through the program, and there’s no telling how many of them went back and spread those lies to their students. All of this is the result of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ multi-million-dollar “Civics Literacy Excellence Initiative.” In the summer of 2022, several voluntary three-day training seminars took place across the state. Teachers who attended were told they would receive a $700 stipend for coming and would be eligible for a $3,000 bonus if they completed additional tasks. That meant many educators were likely to attend one of those sessions if they could find time to do so. The goal of the seminars, in theory, was to give these teachers professional development on the state’s K-12 civics goals. The goals themselves weren’t alarming—they included studying primary sources, teaching kids about government participation, and making sure they knew their rights and responsibilities as citizens. But the alarm bells should have gone off when teachers saw who was putting together the sessions. According to the Miami Herald, which first broke this story that summer, the workshops were “developed with the help of Hillsdale College,” a conservative Christian school in Michigan known for spreading historical David Barton-esque misinformation. Also helping? The “Bill of Rights Institute” founded by one of the right-wing Koch brothers. But that’s all behind the scenes. What were they actually teaching? A sampling of 200 pages’ worth of slides from the workshops are below. They clearly endorsed the Christian Nationalist beliefs that conservative Christianity is the bedrock of our country, that church/state separation as we know it is a myth, and that the Christian God gave us the rights we have:

Just listen to Rep. Ventrella. Listen to her arrogance. Her haughty dismissal of anyone and everyone who feels differently. She’s completely unconcerned with the impact on anyone else of any other faith.. They think they’re the only ones that matter. They think they get to set all the rules. It’s just “too bad” if you happen to be from another religion, or have no religion at all. Everyone has to march to their drum.

They think they are the boss because they have a pack of Fundies on the Supreme Court — and they’re coming for the rest of us. They’re taking us back to the Church of England, by trying to create a Church of America. If they have their way, they’ll take us back to the Inquisition too.

Although they usually just call it “The Storm.”

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