BATON ROUGE — Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill and Governor Jeff Landry are fighting back against a lawsuit aimed at stopping a Louisiana law that requires the Ten Commandments to be posted in public school classrooms.
Murrill argues that the lawsuit is premature because the displays have not yet been put up in classrooms.
“Because this lawsuit is all based on hypothetical facts, the court can’t decide the case yet,” Murrill said during a Monday morning news conference. “The plaintiffs have to show that every application of this law is unconstitutional. They cannot meet that burden.”
Murrill says her office will be filing a brief in court on August 5 arguing that the lawsuit is “foreclosed on procedural grounds by binding Fifth Circuit and Supreme Court precedent”.
The bill, passed by Louisiana’s GOP-dominated Legislature, requires a poster-sized display of the Ten Commandments in “large, easily readable font” in every public school classroom, from kindergarten to university, by January 1, 2025.
“If you want to respect the rule of law, you’ve got to start from the original lawgiver, which was Moses,” Landry said when he signed the bill into law.
The law quickly drew criticism and prompted civil liberties groups to file a lawsuit to block it. Parents of Louisiana public school children are plaintiffs in the suit and are represented by attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and the New York City law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP.
U.S. District Judge John deGravelles issued an order setting a hearing in September and a ruling by November on the suit. The order also requires schools located in East Baton Rouge, Livingston, Orleans, St. Tammany, and Vernon parishes, where the plaintiffs’ children attend school, to hold off on posting the Ten Commandments posters.
“I think that the legislature, in passing this law, perceived it as a statement that the legislature and a representation of the people that all of those legislators represent, are frustrated,” Murrill said. “They are frustrated with the lack of discipline in our schools. They’re frustrated with the inability of the whole system at this point to impose some rules of order, and so they went back to one of the original lawmakers who imposed order, and they said, maybe this will help, and it will at least help start a conversation about order and why rules matter and what the rule of law means.”
Since the bill was signed, Gov. Landry has been publicly advocating for the biblical displays.
“Look, when the Supreme Court meets, the doors of the Supreme Court on the backside have the Ten Commandments. Moses faces the U.S. Speaker of the House in the House chamber. He is the original giver of law,” Landry said in an interview on Fox News in June. “Most of our laws in this country are founded on the Ten Commandments. What’s the big problem? And that’s the part I don’t understand.”
Landry echoed those statements while standing alongside Murrill at Monday’s news conference.
“I think if we go back and we think about a quote that John Adams said, where he said that our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people, and it is wholly inadequate to the government of any other, and if we look at where we are in this country, if we look at the divisiveness that exists, if we look at the anger that some people exhibit in a way that others want to be governed, I think he speaks very frankly about it. I did not know that the Ten Commandments was such a bad way for someone to live their life, and I believe that the legislature was only following the will of the people of the state.”
Landry says that while the Ten Commandments are Christian principles, he believes they are guiding principles for everyone. He said during the Republican National Convention in July that he believes the Ten Commandments may have stopped the man who tried to kill former President Donald Trump.
“I would submit that maybe if the Ten Commandments were hanging on (Thomas Crooks’) wall at the school that he was in, maybe he wouldn’t have taken a shot at the president,” Landry said in an interview with News Nation.
Download the Unfiltered with Kiran app from the Apple App Store and Google Play to stay updated on the latest news across the Capital area.
