Yesterday, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry signed into law a bill that forces public schools to display posters of what Christians call The Ten Commandments in every classroom.
Half of The Ten Commandments amount to commands that people worship the Jewish tribal god Jehovah, and no other gods. That’s ironic, because Christians worship Jesus, who is not Jehovah. Christianity itself violates the Ten Commandments.
Governor Landry claimed that it’s necessary to post the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom because the Ten Commandments are the foundation of American law. “If you want to respect the rule of law,” he said, “you’ve got to start from the original law giver, which was Moses.”
That’s a ridiculous claim, because the Constitution of the United States of America explicitly forbids any legislative act that establishes any religion in the law. That’s the opposite of the intention of the Ten Commandments, which aims to force people into religious worship.
What’s more, the Ten Commandments contains a prohibition of “graven images”, artwork that represents real things in the world. Here in the USA, the First Amendment of the Constitution guarantees freedom of speech.
Besides that, Moses was clearly not the original law giver. It’s silly to suppose that before Moses came along, there were no laws anywhere in the world. Human societies had existed for at least 200,000 years before the fictional/legendary timeline attributed to Moses. People love rules. The idea that no societies had any rules for hundreds of thousands of years is absurd.
The legal frameworks of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) had more of an influence on American law than the Ten Commandments. Why doesn’t Louisiana require posting Haudenosaunee law in all public school classrooms?
You know why.
Christian Nationalists in Louisiana and elsewhere are intent on promoting a pseudohistory that ignores the facts in favor of the claim that America is a Christian nation. They want to wreck American democracy, and trash the foundations of American law, in order to force everyone to submit to Christian power.
The Ten Commandments have become a central text in a cult of Christian fascism.