Louisiana Might Want to Re-think Their New Law

Filtering conservative values through their own lens

John Egelkrout
5 min readJun 23, 2024
Photo by Sean Foster on Unsplash

Conservative Christian nationalists apparently scored a big victory in Louisiana when Governor Jeff Landry signed into law a bill that requires all schools to post the Ten Commandments on their walls. This, of course, depends on whether the law survives the court challenges that lie ahead, but for now, this is what passes for separation of church and state in Louisiana.

The argument that is given as a defense of this obvious breach of the Establishment Clause is that the Ten Commandments are a historical document, and that is why they should be posted. They have emphasized that it is not an attempt to force their religion on anyone.

My eyes are still rolling from when I first read that whopper.

If it truly is a historical document, where is the original kept? I don’t think that is the purpose at all. After all, there are a lot of other historical documents conservatives don’t give a rip about. To me, it appears that when conservatives make a claim like this, they are violating the seventh commandment which prohibits bearing false witness, more commonly known as lying.

These Christian nationalists correctly point out that the words “separation of church and state” do not appear…

--

--

John Egelkrout

I am a sanity-curious former teacher who works a small organic farm with my wife. I write about politics, social issues, memoirs, and a variety of other topics.