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.

  • Em Adespoton@lemmy.ca
    23·
    2 months ago

    The Bible contains two summaries of the ten commandments. Unsurprisingly, what Louisiana wants to put up on a poster is not a literal translation of either of them. Catholics tend to use an interpretation that doesn’t include “no graven images.”

    Two tellings of the Ten Commandments in the Bible are Exodus 20:1-17 and Deuteronomy 5:1-21.

    Note that there’s stuff in there for many Catholics to be unhappy about (carved images, taking the lord’s name in vain) and many protestants (telling children about adultery, observing the sabbath, not coveting, not bearing false witness).

    But those commandments are a small part of the Jewish Mosaic law; Christians are supposed to override that with “love God” and “love the people around you, even those who your social clique shuns” along with “it’s not enough to not do the commandments; if you catch yourself contemplating breaking them in your head, stop doing it.”

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
      17·
      2 months ago

      There’s also only one set of laws the Bible itself says are called the ten commandments and it’s not either of those. In fact, it’s the laws Moses wrote after getting pissed off at the idolaters and decided the first set weren’t explicit enough about what his god did not want people to doing.

      To make it clear: no yeast in blood sacrifices and don’t boil a baby goat in its mothers milk. Or else.

      https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus 34&version=NIV

      (Note that the Old Testament doesn’t really make it clear what the ‘or else’ is going to be in your own case, just that God is a big mean motherfucker and you don’t want to get on his bad side.)