![A stone monument with the text of the Ten Commandments carved on it](https://proxy.freethought.online/daylight/files/2024/06/TenCommandments.jpg)
Not edible.
“What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,’ but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.”
—James 2:14-17
Call me a godless atheist, but I’m in favor of feeding children.
If morality has to start somewhere, this is a good place to plant that flag. No child should ever go hungry; no parent should ever have to worry about where their family’s next meal is coming from. If we allow kids to go hungry when we have the power to feed them, that’s our collective moral failure as a society.
In the U.S., a lot of kids get free meals at school. That raises the question of what happens to them over summer vacation. The Biden administration addressed this with the Summer EBT program, which was expanded during the pandemic and then made permanent by act of Congress in 2022. Low-income families get $40 per child per month, only usable for groceries. States have to share administrative costs, but the federal government funds the benefits.
It seems like a win-win. Yet in 2024, 13 states turned down the money and refused to participate. Guess what they have in common:
All states that declined the opportunity are led by Republicans. Those states are: Alabama, Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas and Wyoming.
One of them was Louisiana, whose Republican governor said this:
Louisiana’s new DCFS secretary, appointed by Gov. Jeff Landry, said the benefit program would have distracted from his agency’s mission.
“Every child deserves a safe home, first and foremost, and families deserve a pathway to self-sufficiency,” David Matlock said in a statement. “Staying focused on that mission, without adding piecemeal programs that come with more strings than long-term solutions, is what will deliver the biggest impact for the children and families we serve.”
The cruelty and callousness of this takes your breath away. The Louisiana state government wants to take food away from children, to teach them some kind of twisted Ayn Rand lesson about how they shouldn’t rely on anyone but themselves.
But at the same time they were making sure hungry kids won’t eat enough over the summer, Louisiana was also doing this:
Signed into law earlier today by Gov. Jeff Landry, HB 71 requires schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom on “a poster or framed document that is at least 11 inches by 14 inches.” The commandments must be the “central focus” of the display and “printed in a large, easily readable font.” The bill also requires that a specific version of the Ten Commandments, which has been dictated by the state Legislature, be used for every display. Displays that depart from this state-sanctioned version of scripture would violate Louisiana law.
If I was writing a novel that had a religious-right demagogue as the villain, and I wanted to make them as cartoonishly evil and over-the-top as possible, I’d have a scene where they sanctimoniously put up a scripture display while taking away food from hungry kids. And I’d feel like a hack, because it would be so heavy-handed. Louisiana Republicans are doing it for real.
These conservatives are making it extremely clear – to those kids, and to the rest of us – that Christianity isn’t about loving your neighbor, helping the needy, or showing compassion. It’s about exerting raw power, forcing your will on others, and proving that you can do what you want because you’re the biggest bully around. (Which is very much the lesson of the Ten Commandments themselves: you should worship God because he’s the biggest and the strongest, and he gets extremely angry and jealous if he doesn’t feel like he’s getting enough flattery.)
Their choice to use a specific version of the Ten Commandments reinforces this. As I’ve written before, there’s not just one set of Ten Commandments. There are two conflicting decalogues in the Bible, depending on which verse you believe. Even when it comes to the set of verses that everyone knows about, Jewish, Catholic and Protestant believers divide it up in different ways to get different lists of rules.
Ordering schools to post one in preference to others is an assertion of pure sectarianism. It’s not just promoting religion over non-religion or Judeo-Christian religion over other belief systems, both of which violate the First Amendment, but promoting one specific sect of Christianity over its competitors. Under any other judiciary, this law would be struck down swiftly. With the current makeup of the Supreme Court, which endorses Louisiana’s view of naked Christian supremacism, I’m not so sure.
I’ll say that the Summer EBT story has a happy ending, of sorts. After the decision was announced, there was enough of an outcry that Louisiana lawmakers caved in and reapplied for the federal funding. Regardless, the fact that there even had to be a fight about this – that feeding hungry children isn’t a self-evident proposition, but a source of controversy and polarizing debate – proves how morally broken the conservative religious faction is. They think they’re sending a lesson about morality, and they are. But it’s the opposite of the one they intend.
Image credit: Kenneth Freeman, released under CC BY-SA 2.0 license