(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Oklahoma's Bible education order is part of a much larger Christofascist plan. Here's how it works. [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2024-06-27 Oklahoma Secretary of Education Ryan Walters today declared that all of the state’s public schools will be required to incorporate the Bible, including the Ten Commandments, into their curricula at every grade level. “The Bible is one of the most historically significant books and a cornerstone of Western civilization, along with the Ten Commandments,” Walters said in a release accompanying the announcement. “They will be referenced as an appropriate study of history, civilization, ethics, comparative religion, or the like, as well as for their substantial influence on our nation’s founders and the foundational principles of our Constitution.” The announcement comes just days after the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled overwhelmingly to prohibit the state from funding a Catholic charter school. The 7-1 decision was overwhelming but straightforward. In Oklahoma, charter schools are public schools, which demands that they be nonsectarian. “St. Isidore’s educational philosophy is to establish and operate the school as a Catholic school,” Justice James R. Winchester, a Republican appointee, wrote in his majority opinion. “Under both state and federal law, the state is not authorized to establish or fund St. Isidore.” The church’s charter school was represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, the radical Christian nationalist legal nonprofit that has been working for decades to chip away at the wall between church and state — Speaker Mike Johnson used to work for the ADF, while Sen. Josh Hawley’s wife is currently one of its top litigators. This case is one of several “religious freedom” education cases that the organization is pursuing at the moment as part of a larger strategy. “We'll probably end up with a variety of different decisions across the country,” Kevin Welner, a professor of education at the University of Colorado Boulder, told me. “That's intentional because the US Supreme Court is more likely to take cases if there is a split among other courts. The idea is to have the US Supreme Court answer this question of whether or not to extend Carson v. Macon to include charter schools.” Carson v. Macon was the SCOTUS decision in 2022 that overturned Maine’s ban on sending public money to private religious schools. It marked a milestone in the ADF’s decades-long effort to pervert the concept of “religious liberty,” which is at the core of its effort to blow up the traditional paradigm of secular education and government. The ADF wants the Supreme Court to rule that charter schools, which are publicly funded and accountable to public standards, are actually private schools, which would mean that they couldn’t be treated differently than nonsectarian schools by the state. Such a ruling would produce a domino effect that would ultimately wind up forcing the public to fully fund bigotry and exclusion. “The next step is that they also have to be allowed to run their school as a religious school, because otherwise you’re violating their free exercise rights,” Welner explained. “The next step is that they can proselytize, have school prayers, and infuse their curriculum with religious teaching. Can they discriminate against kids who are gay? Kids whose parents are gay? If that discrimination is claimed to be rooted in religious beliefs, there's concern that the Supreme Court would say yes, it’s a violation of free exercise if the state applies anti-discrimination laws against to the church. “In other words, if the state steps in and says, ‘you can't discriminate,’ that's discrimination.” It’s ultra-Orwellian, but hardly beyond the pale for this current Supreme Court and Christian nationalist movement. Yesterday, Speaker Johnson and former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, two titans of the war on public education and secular society, spoke openly about their ongoing effort to block and repeal the Biden administration’s latest update to Title IX, which protects LGBTQ+ from discrimination in schools. “It’s having a very devastating effect. It’s something that is a great alarm to all of us,” Johnson said, presumably speaking on behalf of bigots who want to discriminate against queer kids. Johnson also discussed the planned House vote to overturn the new rule, which Biden will veto if it somehow makes it through the Senate. How far will they go? Walters’s latest gambit is designed, much like the new Louisiana law requiring public school classrooms to display the 10 Commandments, to get to the Supreme Court. Given Walters’s obvious ideological motivations and effort to infuse public education with Christianity, it’d be impossible to argue that he sees the Bible as simply a historical document, as he tried to frame it in his announcement today. That said, that may not matter to conservatives on the Supreme Court. “It's hard to see this particular court slamming on the brakes and saying, ‘Hope, that's as far as we're gonna go,’” Welner told me. “It's easier to see this court saying, ‘Hey, look, we've gotten to this point and now we're gonna take our basic core argument and we're gonna keep applying it, because it’s from our understanding of the Constitution.” This term’s most egregious decisions were focused on gutting the state’s ability to regulate business and prevent big money donors from lavishing government officials with gifts (no coincidence there). At first glance, it may seem that they moderated on challenges to abortion and reproductive rights, but it’s far more likely to say that they punted on what will be deeply unpopular decisions, as they did today with their dismissal in the Idaho emergency abortion ban case. The court didn’t rule either way in the joint case, Idaho v. United States and Moyle v. United States, but instead dismissed it as “improvidently granted.” That means that emergency abortions can legally continue for now, but the court made no promises about the future, and it’s likely to be a different story after the election in November. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito voted against dismissing the case and stand ready to sentence women to death at the first opportunity; they’ll likely get their wish soon enough, but the long term future is a bit more unwritten. Assuming Democrats let them continue to be corrupt grifters with impunity, they are likely to stay on the court until either a Republican holds the White House or they die in office. If Donald Trump gets to nominate a few more justices from Leonard Leo’s assembly line of young, far-right ideologues, the court is probably fully cooked for the next three decades. P.S. This is original reporting adapted from my newsletter, Progress Report. 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