Louisiana activated the latest “separation of church and state” hysteria this week when Gov. Jeff Landry (R-LA) signed legislation requiring all classrooms to display a poster of the Ten Commandments.
The response was predictable howling that the legislation violated the separation of church and state. The American Civil Liberties Union announced it would file a lawsuit against the new law and condemned it as “religious coercion.”
Landry, to his credit, declared he “can’t wait to be sued” and said if anyone wants to “respect the rule of law,” he must “start from the original law giver, which was Moses.”
The law seeks to overturn a 1980 Supreme Court precedent in Stone v. Graham, in which the court ruled that a similar statute in Kentucky violated the establishment clause of the Constitution. But as Justice William Rehnquist noted in his dissent, the Ten Commandments are not merely religious doctrine but the foundation for Western law.
“The Ten Commandments have had a significant impact on the development of secular legal codes of the Western world,” he wrote.
Rehnquist, of course, was absolutely correct when he wrote his dissent 44 years ago, and his words are just as true now. The Ten Commandments are an expression of morality that necessarily must be a part of any education.
At its core, education is about the formation of character through intellectual inquiry. Information is useless without a framework through which it is applied. And to deny the role that the Ten Commandments have played in forming the moral framework of society is to be ignorant of history and civics.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
At a time when a growing number of people are rejecting the basic moral truths that stealing is wrong, marital infidelity is wrong, and sometimes even that killing is wrong, the moral guidance of the Ten Commandments is needed more than ever.
If the ACLU has a problem with the Ten Commandments, it should sue to invalidate the long list of laws in force today that derive their moral foundation from the commands that God gave Moses at the top of Mt. Sinai, because clearly, any law informed by the Ten Commandments must violate the separation of church and state.