Judge pushed enactment of law to display religious code until November in response to parents’ suit

Judge pushed enactment of law to display religious code until November in response to parents’ suit

A federal judge blocked Louisiana from posting the Ten Commandments in public schools until November after parents from five districts sued the state over the law.

In a brief ruling Friday, district court judge John deGravelles said that the parents and the state agreed that the Ten Commandments will not be posted in any public school classroom before 15 November. The state also agreed to not “promulgate advice, rules or regulations regarding proper implementation of the challenged statute”.

The state’s Republican governor, Jeff Landry, signed into law last month a bill that requires all classrooms, in K-12 public schools and colleges, to have Ten Commandments posters with “large, easily readable font”. The state is also requiring a four-paragraph “context statement” about how the commandments “were a prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries”.

Soon after the bill was signed, a coalition of parents, supported by the American Civil Liberties Union and other civil rights groups, sued the state saying the bill violates the first amendment.

  • tburkhol@lemmy.world
    16·
    5 months ago

    If you start with the founding of Harvard in 1636 and go to SCOTUS deciding that laws requiring the 10 commandments in classrooms are unconstitutional in 1980, then you get almost 350 years.

    • EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      22·
      5 months ago

      To avoid bias, they should probably post this quote from Thomas Jefferson next to it:

      If God truly does exist, then he more so loves the atheist who questions the world around him than the Christian who blindly follows.

      More than half of the Founding Fathers were agnostic or atheists, and separation of church and state was one of the key principles in their doctrine.

      • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
        15·
        5 months ago

        What I read is that a lot of them claimed to be “deists.”

        I could be wrong, but I get the distinct impression that “deist” was an 18th-century euphemism for “atheist, but in the closet about it so as not to offend the normies.”

        • EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          101·
          5 months ago

          Yeah, probably an older form of agnosticism. But they were very clear in their opposition to a religious state. It was why England separated from the Catholic church, and why many groups emigrated to the US - freedom of religion (or freedom from it).