Louisiana has passed a law that requires the Ten Commandments to be posted in every classroom. Needless to say, that law has been challenged as violating the Establishment Clause of First Amendment clause of the US constitution. However, the governor Jeff Landry says that if parents have a problem with it, the solution is simple.
The far-right Louisiana governor, Jeff Landry, has told parents who don’t want the Ten Commandments hung in up classrooms across the state – as now required by law there – to tell their children to “not look at them”.
The Republican’s remarks came at a news conference on Monday defending the mandate, about two months after Louisiana became the first state in the country to order the Ten Commandments to be displayed in all public school classrooms.
…Shortly after the order was signed, several Louisiana families, backed by civil rights groups, filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking to block the order. The families, who are made up of a coalition of Jewish, Christian, Unitarian Universalist and non-religious parents, argued that the law is unconstitutional. They contend that the law violates US supreme court precedent as well as both the constitutional protection to freely exercise one’s religion and the prohibition against establishing a state religion.
We all know that the best way to stop children from looking at something that is easily visible is to tell them not to look at it, right?
Also, politicians like Landry are the ones pushing for the banning in school libraries of books that they think some parents might object to. Why don’t they use the same logic and say that if those parents dislike certain books, they should simply tell their children not to look at them
Problem solved, right?
This from the same set of clowns who want to protect their children from books by banning them from libraries.
Actually, the best way to get kids not to look at something is to put it up in view with or without fanfare, then carry on with normal business. Kids will very soon see that the thing put up in view changes nothing and doesn’t matter. Then, in the longer term, they’ll also see that the thing doesn’t really matter to the so-called grownups who put it up either. Problem solved. (And other problems exposed.)
Raging Bee @ 2
When I was in 1st and 2nd grade, Sweden still had “Christianity” as a school subject. We learned some biblical names but the whole thing was so boring and confusing it did not affect us any way.
birger: I don’t remember where I saw it so often, but there was a very long “historical timeline” poster-thingie that described the history of Earth and all life on it, starting with the six-day Creation, going through Noah and the Flood, to the “present.” It never even registered in my mind until many years after I first started seeing it; and then it registered as total bullshit.
Like I said, I can’t even remember where I saw that rubbish. I never went to any actual Christian madrassas, though the secular private schools my parents and others were trying to organize may have used madrassa space for a few days here or there while they looked for a permanent location. But I think I was seeing those posters after that period…
I thought we fixed this in 1963, in Abington School District v. Schempp? OK, that was only bible reading and the lord’s prayer, but really, same thing.
Are we living in the Groundhog Day universe?
@3: yeah, I also had one hour of “religion” every week, from elementary up to last year of high school, and it’s still like that at state schools. This because the compact with the Italian state and the Vatican (concordato) mandates this kind of stuff, with the possibility of opting out introduced about 40 years ago.
Needless to say, “religion” was never a subject (a comparative relig course would have been kind of interesting) rather it was exclusively centered on catholicism and its divagations -- after all what else there is to expect in Italy?
Inevitably, the joke’s on them. The hour dedicated to “religion” is very widely regarded as a joke, time to relax and do battle with Bic pen blowguns. It is ALSO regarded as an excellent forge of atheism, due to the teachers mostly being pretty sorry specimens with few exceptions.
Good times, and I expect it’s going to be the same for many pupils over in the US… kids are not so dumb as certain adults think.
Others have already pointed out the ‘this should apply to the books they’re planning on banning as well’… then again, hypocrisy is practically a sacrament to some of these folks. It’s all about ‘we want to force you to live like we think you should’, and any purported explanation on top of that can and will change depending on the details of what they’re trying to force you into.
Also, just bringing up again that the version of the Ten Commandments they’re using doesn’t actually match any previous religious version of the Ten Commandments (so it’s no big surprise there are a lot of Christians wanting to stop this: even those in favour of it in general often realize that putting a version of the Ten Commandments that doesn’t match their listing is asking for trouble). This is the version of the Ten Commandments that was created by a judge who liked sentencing young offenders to Bible classes, a listing deliberately made to not quite match any existing version so as to be ‘non-denominational’, and the version used for the Cecil B. DeMille movie. In other words, it was always meant for political purposes, not religious.
RB @4
I have one of those on display. It’s about 1 1/2 feet tall and 12 foot long. It came in a book but I took it out and made a frame mounted to the wall. I get a good laugh every time I look at it.
You’re being logical. Stop it! Just stop it! You know it confuses MAGAt brains and they already have so much problem thinking that it’s cruel and unusual punishment to subject them to logic. It’s worse than water torture! So just stop it!
If we are to learn about El/Jahve and Jesus, consider this: when Jesus spoke about his enemies being punished, he apparenly meant those opposing him in Judea at the time.
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The eternal punishment for baddies is a hellenistic/persian idea, introduced by John of Patmos in the book of Revelations.
While the ‘church fathers’ who lived centuries later claimed the Patmos guy was the disciple named John, Saul/Paul was probably the only one who could speak greek, or even read and write!
So the weird book with fire-breathing Jews and horse-scorpion-locusts which declared ‘sinners go to hell’ is apochryphal.
And Yeshua ben Joseph keeps getting misspelled. Not a sign of care for precision.
birgerjohansson@#10:
If you’re going to get prickly about spellings, shouldn’t it be Yeshua ben Yosef? Or the equivalent in the actual Hebreww alphabet, since transliterations always cause some irregularities.
(Of course, the actual English equivalent to Yeshua without passing it through Greek first would be Joshua.)
And I’ve heard speculation that Jesus himself could probably speak at least some Greek, as the son of a tradesman in an area where Greek was one of the major trade languages.