Push Reading, Math, Science In Schools Before Religious Zealotry With Ten Commandments

It was near impossible not to snicker last week when learning that Louisiana mandated the Ten Commandments hang in every public classroom across the state. It would be just as useful to hang a copy in each of their outhouses. That Southern state has never much cared about the fact they are the perennial bottom dweller in education. To be fair, it is not only education that perplexes them as there is a raft of state rankings they can also claim. The worst crime. Worst economy. Struggling to be the worst in health care. Let us not even consider where they rank with the raft of sexually transmitted diseases. (The deep South, when we also consider Alabama and Mississippi, is simply a wide swath of embarrassment.)

If one wonders why we must fight off the conservatives at every turn and with every tool at our disposal it becomes very obvious when we consider this example in Louisiana. Republicans had majority control of the Louisiana State Legislature for more than a decade. But the GOP gained a supermajority last year and then gained back the governor’s office with the election of Jeff Landry. Then, like a messy mudslide, the worst ideas not only passed the legislature but slid onto the governor’s desk and signed into law.

The Ten Commandments law is an unconstitutionally driven idea by religious zealots. It has bounced about among conservatives who should have been more concerned about how their public schools failed at teaching reading, math skills, and history. A chapter that includes how the North won and secured the Union in the Civil War. We also must remind some on the other side of the Mason-Dixon Line that the Lost Cause is not actual history. Toss in a course on race relations and a full semester in the serious sciences.

What is interesting for politicos to follow is how this is the first such mandate to pass in any state in over 40 years. It needs to be noted that lawmakers in Oklahoma, Mississippi, and West Virginia, even though controlled by stridently conservative Republicans, did not proceed recklessly with this issue as Louisiana did.

There are assorted reasons to rightly sneer and snicker at Louisiana but there is one aspect to this Ten Commandments story that is too serious to make light of, as it strikes at the foundation of our history.

I do not cotton (no Southern pun intended) to Christian totalitarians. In this case, they outright lied when claiming that the Ten Commandments are the basis of our Constitution. That is simply not the truth. Conservatives want the rest of us to take them seriously. They want their views evaluated on the same plane as those with liberal and educated perspectives. But when evaluating the way Pelican State conservatives pressed their religious arguments, we wind up sadly dismayed at how bereft they are of understanding history. This is yet one more episode that demonstrates and underscores how unfit their public schools have been for decades. The Ten Commandments were not part of the discussions during the constitutional convention.

It should deeply concern everyone that conservatives cannot analyze the reasons we have a separation between religion and our government. Between the faith that can take place in the home but should not intrude into the classroom. I shudder to think how those conservatives would froth if told that our original Constitution’s Bill of Rights is our secular ten commandments. It all comes down to education, education, and more education.