Trump’s Louisiana allies pass law requiring Ten Commandments on school walls
Washington: The Ten Commandments have become the latest flashpoint in America’s culture wars, after Donald Trump allies in Louisiana passed unprecedented new laws requiring the biblical statement to be displayed in every public classroom.
Weeks after moving to reclassify abortion pills as “dangerous” substances, Louisiana has now become the first state where the Ten Commandments will be displayed in “large, easily readable font” from kindergarten to state funded universities.
A copy of the Ten Commandments hang on a wall in the Bible belt in the US.
The commandments are believed by Christians to be laws passed down by God to the Hebrew prophet Moses. Among them are directives such as “thou shalt not commit adultery”, “thou shalt have no other gods before me” and “thou shalt not steal”.
But while proponents say the commandments have historical significance and were once prominent in public schools, civil liberties groups have hit out at the move as “unconstitutional religious coercion” and vowed to sue.
“Here’s a suggested quiz for the schoolchildren of Louisiana: Look at the poster on the wall of the Ten Commandments and write down the total number Donald Trump has broken,” added former Obama adviser David Axelrod.
The changes were the latest initiative by the Republican-dominated state legislature to push a conservative agenda under its new governor Jeff Landry.
Landry is a Trump ally who signed off on the legislation this week by declaring: “If you want to respect the rule of law, you’ve got to start from the original lawgiver, which was Moses.”
Last month, he also gave the green light to a first-of-its kind law classifying two abortion inducing drugs - mifepristone and misoprostol - as controlled and dangerous substances.
The pills are critical for medication abortions, which are the most common method of terminating pregnancies in the US.
A wave of anti-transgender legislation - which had previously been blocked by Landry’s Democratic predecessor, John Bel Edwards, - is also now expected to be pushed through.
Louisiana forms part of America’s “Bible Belt”, a region in the south where Protestant Christianity plays an especially strong role in society and politics.
Australia’s US ambassador Kevin Rudd has been travelling through the region this week, meeting with local Republican politicians in Baton Rouge to spruik Australia’s interests ahead of November’s election, where Trump could end up returning to power.
Under the latest Louisiana law, all public classrooms will be required to display an 11-inch by 14-inch poster-sized display of the Ten Commandments in “large, easily readable font” from kindergarten to state-funded universities.
A four-paragraph “context statement” describing how the Ten Commandments “were a prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries,” will also be included with the display, which must be in all classrooms receiving state funding by 2025.
However, the American Civil Liberties Union state branch says such displays will “result in unconstitutional religious coercion of students, who are legally required to attend school and are thus a captive audience for school-sponsored religious messages.”
“They will also send a chilling message to students and families who do not follow the state’s preferred version of the Ten Commandments that they do not belong, and are not welcome, in our public schools,” the ACLU’s Louisiana branch said in a statement announcing its intention to sue.
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