Good News in Louisiana: Ten Commandments Revivalism
I’ve watched for the last week since Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry signed an overwhelmingly passed bill from his state’s legislature which would promulgate the Ten Commandments in all public classrooms in the Bayou State from kindergarten to the public universities, as the Left has absolutely melted down.
It’s been fun, for all kinds of reasons. But the schadenfreude of seeing the Left’s Moses Derangement Syndrome has to be tempered by some disappointment that we’re not getting the meaty discussion of what the bill’s passage into law signifies. (READ MORE: Rep. Jamaal Bowman and the Toxic Rot of the Squad)
Not yet, at least. But there is reason for optimism that we soon will.
The declining James Carville, who isn’t quite as incapacitated as Joe Biden but is rapidly losing his communicative powers along with his political relevance, went on CNN a couple of days ago and called the passage of the bill the “stupidest waste of time I’ve ever seen.” That’s a decent summation of the general argument Democrats are making about the new law, and it’s anything but profound.
Of course, reading more into their statements than is actually there, some deeper meaning can be derived.
One of Scott’s Inevitable Political Axioms is that all “conservative” victories are fleeting, while all “liberal” victories are permanent. It’s one reason I’m trying to stop calling myself a conservative and I suggest that if you agree with me, you join me in adopting the “revivalist” moniker instead.
Revivalists don’t accept that axiom. Revivalists are determined to play offense against the Left. And the Ten Commandments bill in Louisiana is a great example of this.
Carville thinks the bill is a waste of time because he believes that the Supreme Court has already said putting up the Ten Commandments on public school classroom walls is unconstitutional. When the Left imposes a victory via the Supreme Court, overturning hundreds of years of American experience with religion in the public square as the Brennan Court did with Lemon v. Kurtzman in 1971 and Stone v. Graham in 1980 (the latter case threw out a Kentucky law nearly identical to the one just passed in Louisiana), that victory is set in stone every bit as dense as those tablets Moses carried down from Mt. Sinai.
This is bunkum and claptrap, of course. The Left doesn’t get to impose law out of whole cloth through courts they turn into super-legislatures without ultimately having to defend their logic. That delusion failed in the Dobbs case which overturned the horrid judicial reasoning of Roe v. Wade, and the legislators, governor, and attorney general in Louisiana are betting the same will happen here.
And not without reason.
Louisiana’s Ten Commandments law is a direct assault on Stone v. Graham. It’s important to understand how huge this is, instead of blindly accepting the shallow construct the James Carvilles of the world would impose on this debate. (READ MORE: SCOTUS Takes on Congressional Malaise and Executive Branch Overreach)
This is about going on offense and tearing down the pillars of the Left’s reality.
In a sane America, this bill wouldn’t even be controversial. A sane America would recognize that a state legislature has the inherent power to shape the lessons being taught to public school pupils within its jurisdiction, and that if such a legislature believes that the document from which all Western law and morality flows should be included in those lessons that is the end of the matter.
The Ten Commandments were ubiquitous within (and without) the confines of American education for hundreds of years, from before the nation’s founding to practically five minutes ago. That was Stone v. Graham, and in that case, the Court’s majority used something called the Lemon test, which was a formulation it had laid down in the prior case of Lemon v. Kurtzman.
The Lemon test has three parts:
- Secular Purpose: The government action or law must have a legitimate secular purpose. In other words, the purpose must be unrelated to the advancement or inhibition of religion.
- Primary Effect: The government action or law must not have the primary effect of advancing or inhibiting religion. The court must consider whether the action or law has a neutral or secular effect.
- Excessive Entanglement: The government action or law must not result in an excessive entanglement between government and religion. This includes situations where the government is too closely involved with religious institutions or activities.
In Stone v. Graham, the Court found the Kentucky law lacked a legitimate secular purpose. Apparently, the founding document of Western law and morality is only relevant as a religious relic. That’s what William Brennan, the far-left kook who wrote the opinion in the case and who was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court at the time, would have you believe.
A case from two years ago, Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, involved a high school football coach in Washington State who took to midfield to pray after games. He got fired for his trouble and sued. According to the Lemon test, having school employees praying, even if not under the color of official action, would be a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. However, the Court ruled that the Lemon test doesn’t apply to unofficial individual actions. And Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion in Kennedy was a good bit less complimentary than that, disparaging Lemon as having “invited chaos in the lower courts.”
That’s a decent indication a fuller reversal of the Brennan court might be coming when John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and Neil Gorsuch get an opportunity to vet this Louisiana law.
Given the current jurisprudence, what Louisiana has done is to invite America to return to sanity. And with the ACLU suing less than 24 hours after Landry signed the bill into law, giving the governor precisely what he asked for when he said “I can’t wait to be sued” at the signing ceremony, we’re now on the road to a full repudiation of Stone v. Graham. More importantly, in the crosshairs is the idea that leftist judges can rob states of their ability to impose the moral traditions that built Western society simply by constructing emanations and penumbras out of a constitution that exists only in their minds. (READ MORE: Joe Biden’s Executive Amnesty Is Illegal, Unjust, and Self-Defeating)
If Landry and the Louisiana legislators aren’t all wet, what this new law would do would be to help reset the relationship between the states — which are supposed to be sovereign under our constitution — and an obnoxious federal government dominated by busybody leftists who disparage the traditions the country is founded on.
Remember, John Adams said our constitution is “made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Do you think Adams would object to the posting of the Ten Commandments in public classrooms? Buddhists and Satanists weren’t on his mind when he issued that quote, you know.
So how can the Decalogue posted in the classrooms be unconstitutional?
The Ten Commandments are not identified with any particular religious denomination. The Decalogue applies to every Christian sect. It’s a fundamental precept of Judaism. It even applies, although a bit differently, in Islam. So how is it an establishment of a state religion to promote something that cuts across the vast majority of the religious tracks Americans follow?
News flash: It isn’t. The only way you get there is if you hate religion as a whole.
Nobody seriously argues that moral instruction in those schools has improved since God was banned from the classroom. Instead what you get is name-calling, essentially that religious people are intolerant bigots and that it’s a threat to various groups that they might gain some influence in those schools.
But the results are absurd. School districts are firing football coaches for praying on the field after the game while those districts are dealing with scandal after scandal surrounding grooming and sexual abuse of kids in their care. These same people are putting gay porn in school libraries and calling critics of that activity “censors” and “book burners.”
Of course, there is the bait-and-switch afoot here, which is that William Brennan promised us an enlightened America in which the public square would be a neutral place observant of a diversity of faiths and traditions and individuals could choose which track to follow out of their informed reasoning. Instead, what we were given was a woke totalitarianism where climate-change moonbattery, LGBTQ Pride activism, Critical Race Theory, and other insipid horrors flying directly in the face of Judeo-Christian moral teachings were enshrined as the new cultural hegemony.
If you’re unfortunate enough to work in corporate America or on a college campus you’ll see how aggressively evangelical the woke religion can be, your own faith-based objections notwithstanding.
The ACLU will tell you the Ten Commandments are taboo but Drag Queen Story Hour is protected speech. This is not the neutral public space you were promised.
Accordingly, a revivalist position, which is superior to the conservative one, holds that since the Left broke Brennan’s promise, there is no requirement — and there should be no desire — to simply attempt to return to that faux neutrality in the public square. The Left used it as a cover for imposing a culture on the rest of us that practically nobody wants, so it’s time to roll things back to what our Founding Fathers envisioned, which worked pretty damned well for a quarter of a millennium on these shores.
We’re still a Christian country — or at least a Judeo-Christian one. Even people who don’t go to church or synagogue enjoy the benefits of the society that its moral code constructed. The anti-Christian bigots at the ACLU and other leftist organizations, parasitical to the core in sharing in those benefits while actively seeking to destroy that which underpins them, do not represent a majority outside of the cities their allies have utterly destroyed.
It’s entirely reasonable for a state legislature and governor to turn to the most ecumenical moral document available to recenter its educational system. It’s also entirely reasonable that the legislature and governor in question would have the power to do so.
This is a real fight about big things. It’s a fight worth winning. Revivalism is about starting as many of them as possible until James Carville has to recognize that his victories are no more permanent than ours are.
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