Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo
Workers repaint a Ten Commandments billboard off Interstate 71 near Chenoweth, Ohio, on Election Day, November 7, 2023.
Yesterday, the state of Louisiana went where Christian nationalists have longed to go, and where the First Amendment says it shouldn’t. Its MAGA governor signed into law a bill passed by its MAGA legislature requiring all public schools (including public colleges and universities) to post the Ten Commandments in every classroom. It stipulates that these wall hangings be no smaller than 11 by 14 inches and that the text be “in a large, easily readable font.”
Just in case the courts notice that this runs afoul of the Constitution, the new law included a rather perfunctory argument that the Commandments were also a historical document—“a prominent part of American public education for nearly three centuries.” By that standard, of course, the state might also mandate displaying the Declaration of Independence and the Pythagorean theorem, but no such legislation has been forthcoming.
That said, the legislators and governor didn’t really intend the Commandments to be seen as documenting past educational practices. They passed the law, said state Rep. Dodie Horton, its author, so that “our children [can] look up and see what God says is right and what He says is wrong.”
Commandments two through ten do provide such instruction; but number one, let’s face it, is really more a statement of the divinity’s identity: “I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt have no other gods before me.” There are, of course, tens of millions of Americans who don’t actually believe that the god depicted in the Book of Exodus is their god, or that such gods actually exist.
That said, if the purpose of posting the Commandments is to inculcate sound behavior in the young, and if the hurdle such posting must clear is that these lessons are parts of our national heritage that were once widely celebrated, if not universally adhered to, I can think of other documents that might merit similar posting.
Consider, for instance, the lyrics of a 1920s song that became a nationwide hit and provided young Americans with valuable life lessons, many of which still offer sound counsel today. Here are the first two stanzas:
Button up your overcoat,
When the wind is free,
Take good care of yourself,
You belong to me!
—
Eat an apple every day,
Get to bed by three,
Oh, take good care of yourself,
You belong to me!
(The “You belong to me” line, I acknowledge, isn’t really a lesson as such, but might be analogous to that first Commandment, “I am the Lord thy God” etc.)
In its subsequent stanzas, the song actually enumerates more than ten discrete pieces of advice, culminating in:
Keep away from bootleg hooch
When you’re on a spree,
Take good care of yourself,
You belong to me!
The song was made famous by singer Helen Kane, who was the inspiration for the cartoon character Betty Boop. It was written by the very successful ’20s songwriting team of DeSylva, Henderson, and Brown, so here, too, orthodox Christians should be happy to learn, the creator had a trinitarian identity.
