Republicans Introduce Bills To Require the Displaying of the Ten Commandments and Creating Prayer Times

Lawmakers in Texas are seeking to further infuse religion into public schools with two new bills.A state senator, Phil King, introduced a bill Monday requiring schools to display the Ten Commandments in classrooms. Another senator, Mayes Middleton, introduced a bill that would let schools create time for students to pray and read the Bible or “other religious texts.”“The Ten Commandments are part of our Texas and American story. They are ingrained into who we are as a people and as a nation,” Mr. King said in a statement about his proposal. “Today, our students cry out for the moral clarity, for the statement of right and wrong that they represent. If our students don’t know the Ten Commandments, they will never understand the foundation for much of American history and law.”Mr. Middleton said in a statement about his bill, “Our schools are not God-free zones.”“We are a nation built on ‘In God We Trust.’ You have to ask: are schools better or worse off since prayer was taken out,” Mr. Middleton said. “Litigious atheists are no longer going to get to decide for everyone else if students and educators exercise their religious liberties during school hours.”He also said there is “no such thing as ‘separation of church and state’ in our Constitution, and recent Supreme Court decisions by President Trump’s appointees reaffirmed this.”A state representative, David Spiller, introduced a similar bill in the Texas House, and both would require students to have parental consent to participate in the prayer time. Texas is one of several conservative states that have tried to bring the Ten Commandments into the classroom in recent months. Louisiana kicked off the latest round of states passing laws requiring that the commandments be posted in all public classrooms in prominent locations with “large, easily readable font.” Classrooms are also supposed to include a “context statement” about how the Ten Commandments “were a prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries.”Louisiana’s law was quickly hit with a legal challenge. In November, a district judge at Baton Rouge, John W. deGravelles, said the law is “unconstitutional on its face” and ordered the state not to enforce it while the legal process to determine its future played out.In 1980, the Supreme Court struck down a Kentucky law that required the posting of the Ten Commandments, as it found that the law did not have a secular purpose and violated the First Amendment’s establishment clause.Still, lawmakers in other conservative states are pushing to add the Ten Commandments in schools. In Kentucky, lawmakers in the state’s General Assembly are considering a bill that would make the inclusion of the law code in public schools a requirement and another bill that would make it optional.Lawmakers in Georgia, Ohio, Montana, and North Dakota are also considering similar bills. However, on Monday, South Dakota’s House rejected such a proposal. The ACLU celebrated the bill’s failure and said it should be a “reality check” to lawmakers who “want to use public schools to religiously indoctrinate students.”The advocacy manager of ACLU of South Dakota, Samantha Chapman, said in a statement, “Public schools are not Sunday schools, and today’s vote ensures that our public school classrooms will remain spaces where all students, regardless of their faith, feel welcomed.”While Louisiana’s law has been put on hold, in Texas, Mr. King argues his bill will stand up to legal scrutiny due to the Supreme Court’s Kennedy v. Bremerton School District decision. That case centered around the Bremerton School District’s decision to fire a high school football coach, Joseph Kennedy, for praying with students after school games. In a 6-3 ruling, the court found the school district violated Mr. Kennedy’s First Amendment rights by firing him. Mr. King said in his statement that the Kennedy ruling overturned the precedent that was used in the Supreme Court’s 1980 Stone v. Graham decision, which struck down Kentucky’s Ten Commandments law at the time. “The legal landscape has been restored,” Mr. King said. “This legislation is in accord with the history and traditions of our state and nation. It will help ensure our students understand and appreciate the role of the Ten Commandments in our heritage, our system of law, and their impact throughout Western Civilization.”The school prayer bills may have an easier time withstanding legal challenges. A 1962 Supreme Court ruling prohibits school-sponsored prayer. However, A professor at the South Texas College of Law, Josh Blackman, told Fox 4, “If this is done like a zero period or some other period where you are not required to be, that might pass muster so long as that element of coercion is not present.”Mr. Blackman also told the outlet that he believes the Kennedy decision could help the Ten Commandments law survive a legal challenge as well. “The court held that you can have prayer for a football game, and if students don’t like it, they can, you know, look away and avert their eyes,” he said. Besides attempts to display the Ten Commandments and bring prayer to schools, Texas has taken other steps to include religious themes in education. In November, the Texas School Board approved an optional state-wide curriculum for kindergarten through fifth grade that contains lessons from the Bible in reading and language arts classes.The ACLU argues it violates “students’ constitutional rights to be free of state-sponsored religious coercion” and would “put certain students at risk of bullying, harassment, and stigmatization.”However, Governor Abbott said including the religious lessons will “allow our students to better understand the connection of history, art, community, literature, and religion on pivotal events like the signing of the U.S. Constitution, the Civil Rights Movement, and the American Revolution.”

Republicans Introduce Bills To Require the Displaying of the Ten Commandments and Creating Prayer Times

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