The Four-Ton Oversight

When Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry signed the state's new law requiring all public school classrooms to display the Ten Commandments, he let his faith get ahead of the facts.

Theodore Roberts, The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. Demille, Dir.) Public Domain

Louisiana now has a new law requiring every classroom in the state to post a copy of the Ten Commandments, but when the governor announced it, he made a colossal mistake.

It was the kind of error that might go unnoticed in Gov. Landry’s Louisiana, which is ranked third least-educated in the nation (behind West Virginia and Mississippi).

It was the kind of omission that didn’t even register in the state legislature, which drafted the measure and where Republicans hold a two-thirds supermajority and dominate every statewide public office. Even if any of those lawmakers had noticed, they would not have cared.

Because they have bigger fish to fry

They are trying to make America godly again. And what better way to do that than to take the lead in putting the Law of Moses under the noses of every student in every classroom from kindergarten through college.

It was a bold move in the ongoing battle between good and evil. For once, it was Louisiana serving as the engine and not the caboose. With a stroke of the pen, Gov. Landry pushed his state out front—ahead of other states with similar bills in the offing like Texas, Florida, Utah.

And states like Ohio, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Oklahoma, which last June allowed students to leave school for three class periods a week to attend religious classes. Religious classes that do not have to be taught by certified educators and for which the students are required to receive credit.

If you grew up in the United States before or shortly after WWII,

all of this seems to fly the face of the Constitution’s Establishment Clause, which the courts used for many years to uphold the principle of separation of church and state.

To some that idea seems as American as apple pie. Every school child knows that the Pilgrims came to America to escape religious persecution.

Those who follow the legal system know that in 1947 in Everson v. Board of Education the Supreme Court relied on Thomas Jefferson’s own words regarding separation of church and state even though those exact words are not in the Constitution.

That idea held for another four decades until William Rehnquist challenged it in 1985 with his dissent to Wallace v. Jaffree, which struck down an Alabama law requiring public schools to begin each day with one minute of silence.

There is simply no historical foundation for the proposition that the Framers intended to build the ‘wall of separation’ that was constitutionalized in Everson [v. Board of Education]. [The Court’s establishment clause jurisprudence] has been expressly freighted with Jefferson’s misleading metaphor for nearly 40 years.

—William Rehnquist

That dissent was a tiny crack in what had previously been regarded as an impenetrable wall separating church and state.

Since then, the crack has widened.

In 2022, for instance, the Supreme Court broke its longstanding Jeffersonian tradition and ruled in favor of a Christian group that wanted to fly a flag with a cross at Boston city hall.

It ruled in favor of a Washington football coach who was suspended for leading his players in Christian prayers on the field after a game. And it ruled in favor of using taxpayer money for students to attend religious schools in Maine.

That same year, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority struck down Roe v. Wade, ignoring its own doctrine of stare decisis, which means “to stand by things decided.” They did this even though they all claimed during confirmation hearings that Roe was “established law.”

Go ahead and sue

In the present legal climate, it’s easy to see why Louisiana’s Gov. Landry is daring others to sue over his state’s new Ten Commandments law. He believes the current Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority will finish bulldozing the wall between church and state, clearing the way for godliness.

Although he didn’t mean it for public consumption, Justice Samuel Alito recently signaled as much when he recently told a reporter with a hidden microphone that he’s in favor of moving the country toward godliness.

So Gov. Landry has every reason to believe his state will ultimately prevail against any legal challenge.

But here’s what the governor got wrong

When he signed the new law, Landry said: “If you want to respect the law you gotta start with the original lawgiver, which was Moses.”

Now maybe they don’t teach this in Louisiana, but the original lawgiver predates Moses by several hundred years. And it wasn’t Hammurabi, either, whose code of 282 laws is usually cited as the oldest written law on record. Nope, the original lawgiver was the Sumerian ruler Ur-Nammu of the city of Ur, who dates all the way back to the 21st century B.C.

Also before Moses and Hammurabi, there was Lipit-Ishtar, another Sumerian ruler whose collection of laws went back to the 20th-century BC.

The Code of Hammurabi came abut 200 years later in Babylon.

It dates from between 1792 BC to 1750 BC, well before the Ten Commandments, which appeared sometime between the 13th and 16th centuries BC.

There’s an ongoing debate among scholars about whether the Law of Moses was influenced by Hammurabi’s Code (minus tidbits like an eye-for-an-eye).

But there’s no debate about the four-ton slab the code is etched on. It’s a basalt stele and stands more than seven feet tall. Plundered during a 12th-century raid on the Babylonian city of Sippar, it was rediscovered in present-day Iran back in 1901. Today, it resides in the Louvre.

The basalt stele Code of Hammurabi (detail) via Wikimedia. See full image here.

Why does this matter?

It matters because Gov. Landry and his white Christian Nationalist cronies argue that the Ten Commandments is a historical document. It’s for historical reasons, not primarily religious ones, that they should be displayed in the state’s classrooms. Landry himself refers to the commandments as having been handed down from the original lawgiver Moses.

This is where Landry’s faith got in the way of the facts. Because if your intention is to post the original law in every classroom in the state—for historical purposes—you need to go back to Sumeria and Babylon and post those laws.

It’s easy to see this so-called historical argument is mere subterfuge. This is a desperate move by white Christian Nationalists to subvert the longstanding premise of majority rule with minority rights.

According to the Public Religion Research Institute in Washington, DC, the number of white Christians in the United States has dwindled from 54% in 2008 to 45% as of last year. The think tank’s founder and chief executive put it this way:

What we’re seeing is a desperate power grab as the sun is setting on white Christian America. In the courts, instead of moving slowly and systematically, it’s a lurch.

In the meantime we’re going to be left with essentially an apartheid situation in the US where we’re going to have minority rule by this shrinking group that’s been able to seize the levers of power, even as their cultural democratic representation in the country shrinks.

To be against this power grab is not the same as being against the Ten Commandments. And it doesn’t mean being opposed to living in accord with spiritual principles. But it does mean standing up to anyone who wants to impose their beliefs on others at the expense of the nation’s foundational pillars.

If you don’t believe there’s a white nationalist power grab taking place

just take a look at Gov. Landry signing the new Ten Commandments measure into law. As soon as he invoked the name of Moses, one of those onlookers shouted Amen!—for historical purposes, I’m sure.

Half of my DNA comes from Louisiana ancestors—many of whom like my mother and grandmother were deeply religious. I’m mighty proud of them and grateful for the values they instilled in me. As an African-American with a gumbo of cultures rolling around in my blood, I can truly say the photograph of Landry signing that law does not look like the culturally rich state of Cajuns, Creoles, Haitians, French, Spanish and Africans to me.

It looks like a trip to the original cracker barrel around which rural white people supposedly conversed in old-style country stores in the late 19th-century during the hey-day of segregation.

I’m sure those good God-fearing people surrounding Gov. Landry meant well, but they don’t look like Louisiana to me. And they don’t look like America either.

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry signing the state’s new Ten Commandments law.

©2024 Andrew Jazprose Hill

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