Michael Sean Winters asks, Why are we fighting over the 10 Commandments? to which there are a number of answers, the most informative one is a. because it's an election year and Republican-fascists can be counted on to get those ol' liberal-lefty knees jerking over some unconstitutional matter of little real importance, so as to marshal the right-wing knees to jerk themselves to the polls and put them in power. They do it every election cycle and if they don't do it some liberal-libertarian asshole like Bill Maher can be counted on to do it to get publicity. If I could be bothered I'd go back and look for my post on his pre-election stupidity, "Religulous" which he put out with similar timing in 2008 and given who he is, probably for the same reason.
Don't get me wrong, I am absolutely, 100% in on the separation of church and state as a great idea, but like many great ideas it isn't the only great idea.
Democrats winning elections and governing AND APPOINTING FEDERAL JUDGES AND "JUSTICES" IS A FAR GREATER IDEA.
I am old enough and come from a small New England yankee dominated town at the very end of the traditional English-Scottish hatred of Catholics and Catholicism around here, I remember knowing that my first grade teacher didn't like Catholics. I had thought it was just the French Canadian kids she hated, then I realized she hated Irish Catholics as much. It did have a real impact on my early life going far past the daily recitation of the Lords Prayer with the customary appendage of the Doxology and being exposed to the KJV. I was still in school when the Warren Court banned such religious content from public schools and remember it coming of something of a relief. So I am all in favor of keeping it out of schools. Though, as I've grown up noticing of those townspeople I grew up with and who had such religious content presented to them at school, it doesn't seem to have much taken in their lives. Even the Protestant churches in town are largely empty and I notice no great effect on their moral lives, whether personal and no one's business nor in their public, financial behavior. If there is some vestige of moral inclination such as "forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors" or, in the Catholic version replacing "debts" with "trespasses" and "teresspass against us" I haven't noticed it in many of them. The ones who went into real estate development are as amoral as Trump.
So I think it's an important issue but its far from the most important issue, and that's only in so far as children in schools go. Things like posting the Big 10 in courtrooms? In Louisiana? You may as well get worked up over what color they paint the walls. It is entirely unimportant and no matter what the dolts at the ACLU say, it's not worth getting into a religious brawl over this in any year, least of all a decisive election year. I don't agree with everything Winters says but it's at least worth considering. Here's a sample.
At The Hill, Southern Methodist University professor of religious studies Mark Chancey denounced the decision as "alarming." He recalled the incident in 1859 when 11-year-old Thomas Wall, a young Catholic student, refused to recite the Protestant version of the Ten Commandments and had his hands beaten. Surely, such an incident can and should be included in whatever curriculum is devised to explain the historical significance of the Commandments.
"Permanently posting the Ten Commandments in every Louisiana public-school classroom — rendering them unavoidable — unconstitutionally pressures students into religious observance, veneration, and adoption of the state's favored religious scripture," fretted the American Civil Liberties Union in a complaint filed to block the new law.
At Religion News Service, Mark Silk is right to chuckle at these religiously motivated politicians bending over backward to make the case that the Ten Commandments is of secular significance: The new law also requires posting of the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, but the Ten Commandments are difficult to disentangle from their religious significance.
But while it is not true to call America a "Christian nation," for most of its history it was a nation of Christians, and they certainly were motivated in their understanding of law in part by the tablets Moses brought down from Sinai.
Everybody needs to take a deep breath and relax.
I am entirely in favor of every child, in school or not being taught the substance of "give us this day our daily bread," "forgive us our wrongs as we forgive those who wrong us," and especially "lead us not into temptation and deliver us from evil." as well as things like not lying, not stealing, not breaking your promises in marriage and outside of it, etc. I am entirely in favor of making those truths of morality more effective in effecting the lives and behaviors of everyone, from childhood on. I am in favor of every child being thoroughly indoctrinated in the moral requirements of equality, of fairness, of kindness in school and out. I am even in favor of those and similar messages being taught by the media, movies, TV, internet and their opposite vices and immorality presented as unattractive and evil. I am entirely opposed to the regime of amorality that the idiot civil libertarians thought was better than the whiff of religion that they feared would infect the minds of children. Though I would be in favor of those being presented from a non-denominational and even non-religious framing, though I don't think there is any way to present them as enduring and effectively durable truths without God being the source of that. There is no other ultimate explanation of their truth and why someone should do good when they don't want to or want to do wrong, instead.
That said, this years version of that worrying about some actual harm in fucking Louisiana courtrooms is as absurd a swivet to get into as could be imagined. AS IF LOUISIANA OR ANY OTHER JUDICIARY AND THE LAWYER-LIARS WHO PRACTICE LAW ARE GOING TO BE IMPACTED TO ACT MORE MORALLY! I doubt posting them in ten-inch high letters where no one could miss them would lead to a single one of them giving up adultery or, more to the point, stealing and coveting. It wouldn't stop them from taking God's name in vain every time someone takes an oath or administers it (Jesus telling us not to swear but let our yes mean yes and no, no, has certainly not been a Commandment that the courts follow).
This is an election year stunt by Republican-fascists and it would be best ignored, entirely. It will have no meaning, whether it stands and it will under the Roberts-Republican-fascist court, or it falls in some unlikely future. It is more of a religious affront to do its blasphemous use of religion and reference to God in an amoral scheme than it is an affront against secularism. Though, as I've indicated recently, I don't give a damn about affronts against secularism anymore. If such secularists took Democrats winning elections and preventing fascism more, I might be inclined to take them a bit more seriously. I don't take the ACLU seriously anymore at any time.
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