Louisiana may soon require public school classrooms to display the Ten Commandments

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Louisiana could soon become the first state to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom — in another expansion of religion into day-to-day life by a Republican-dominated legislature.

The legislation, which received final approval from the state’s GOP-dominated Legislature earlier this week and heads to the desk of conservative Gov. Jeff Landry. It mandates that a a poster-sized display of the Ten Commandments in “large, easily readable font” be required in all public classrooms, from kindergarten to state-funded universities.

Similar bills have been proposed in other statehouses — including Texas, Oklahoma and Utah. However with threats of legal battles over the constitutionality of such measures, no state has had success in the bills becoming law. If signed into law in Louisiana, legal challenges are expected to follow.

Legal battles over the Ten Commandments in classrooms are not new, but have spanned decades.

In 1980, the U. S. Supreme Court ruled that a similar Kentucky law was unconstitutional and in violation of the establishment clause of the US Constitution, which says Congress can “make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” The high court found that the law had no secular purpose, but rather served a plainly religious purpose.

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