Louisiana AG Blasphemes Lin Manuel Miranda In Attempt To Make Forcing Religion On Kids Constitutional

AND WE WILL NOT STAND FOR THAT.

Back in June, the state of Louisiana passed a law (HB71) requiring that every classroom in every public and private school across the state put up ginormous posters of the King James version of the Ten Commandments, we can assume for the explicit purpose of trolling non-Christian (and non-Protestant Christian) children and making them feel unwelcome at the schools their parents taxes pay for.

Louisiana Gov. So Excited At Chance To Bully Non-Christian Schoolchildren!

Prior to signing the bill, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry actually told attendees at a Republican fundraiser, “I can’t wait to be sued.”

And that is just what happened. The parents of these children and fans of civil liberties immediately filed a lawsuit in hopes of keeping the blatantly unconstitutional posters the hell out of school classrooms.

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But Landry and Louisiana AG Liz Merrill were prepared! Sort of! Because they came up with a whole bunch of trollish loopholes they think will make their obviously unconstitutional law constitutional — and held a press conference to explain.

Merrill explained that the brief she filed against the lawsuit states that the plaintiffs have no case because they haven’t actually seen any of their religious displays and therefore cannot say they are unconstitutional.

The brief itself reads:

Plaintiffs allege that they “object to, and will be harmed by, the religious displays mandated by [the law].” Across more than 100 paragraphs of “Factual Allegations,” however, the Complaint never mentions a single Defendant or a single H.B. 71 display. […] For good reason: No Plaintiff or their child has seen an H.B. 71 display. In fact, no one knows how any given school or official—including Defendants—will implement H.B. 71, what any given H.B. 71 display will look like, or whether any given H.B. 71 display will pose a potential constitutional issue. As a result, the most Plaintiffs can speculate is that, by “implementing H.B. 71,” the named Defendants “will” violate Plaintiffs’ constitutional rights.

Again, we all know what the Ten Commandments are and that the goal of this law is the establishment of religion by the state.

If that argument falls through, Merrill explained that her next argument is that, in order to say that the law is unconstitutional, the defendants would have to prove that every possible way the Ten Commandments could hypothetically be displayed would be unconstitutional — which, of course, makes no goddamn sense.

To illustrate her point, Merrill pointed to a bunch of workups of posters that she thinks could be constitutional, but which make no sense and take a variety of statements from a variety of people and Broadway shows out of context.

One particularly absurd poster places the Ten Commandments and a picture of Charlton Heston next to a summary of the song “Ten Duel Commandments” from Hamilton.

So, look — I am obviously a very big fan of Hamilton, but even aside from the “It’s still not constitutional!” of it all, I’m not sure this is a very good idea. You know, what with our whole mass shooting problem and all. Like, these people really want to put the rules for a gun fight on the walls of a school, literally next to the Ten Commandments? What the hell are they thinking?

Another poster featured in the conference has already brought the ire of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s family, as it presents a quote from a paper she wrote in the 8th grade as though it were something she wrote as an adult Supreme Court Justice.

“The use of my grandmother’s image in Louisiana’s unconstitutional effort to display the Ten Commandments in public schools is misleading and an affront to her well-documented First Amendment jurisprudence,” Clara Spera told Rolling Stone. “By placing the quote next to an official Supreme Court portrait of her in judicial robes and a jabot, Louisiana is misleading the public by suggesting that Justice Ginsburg made the statement about the Ten Commandments being among the world’s ‘four great documents’ while serving as a Supreme Court Justice.”

Another poster highlighted “Legal Non-Profits In Action” and described the ACLU’s opposition to putting the Ten Commandments up in classrooms — which, obviously they’re busting balls here, because the ACLU is one of the groups suing their asses.

Another tried to compare the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s rules for non-violence to the Ten Commandments, because Moses was the first guy to do a top ten list and therefore every list of ten things inspired by him.

I am only half surprised that they did not include a still from the classic movie 10 Things I Hate About You. Although one poster that I have yet to actually see supposedly included a still from Mean Girls, with Rachel McAdams saying, “Why are you so obsessed with me?” which they supposedly conflate with how people are “obsessed” with keeping the Ten Commandments out of public school classrooms. So weird!

Another was just like “Hey! You know who does laws? Moses! Also, Congress! That is how these things are related. Also there is a marble relief portrait of Moses (supposedly, because no one knows what Moses looked like, you absolute weirdos) in Congress!”

So constitutional!

Still another poster includes out-of-context quotes from the Supreme Court about the Ten Commandments.

One quote — “This Court has subscribed to the view that the Ten Commandments influenced the development of Western legal thought” — comes from Justice John Paul Stevens’ dissent in Van Order v. Perry, in which he writes the exact opposite of what is implied here.

Though this Court has subscribed to the view that the Ten Commandments influenced the development of Western legal thought, it has not officially endorsed the far more specific claim that the Ten Commandments played a significant role in the development of our Nation’s foundational documents (and the subsidiary implication that it has special relevance to Texas). Although it is perhaps an overstatement to characterize this latter proposition as “idiotic,” […] as one Member of the plurality has done, at the very least the question is a matter of intense scholarly debate. […] Whatever the historical accuracy of the proposition, the District Court categorically rejected respondents’ suggestion that the State’s actual purpose in displaying the Decalogue was to signify its influence on secular law and Texas institutions.

Another quote, from Justice David Souter’s dissent, suggests that there are ways a display of the Ten Commandments in a classroom could hypothetically not violate anyone’s rights, but I’m not sure the existence of a showtune titled “Ten Duel Commandments” hits the mark.

Landry, for his part, argued that the law is just democracy in action, that it is what the majority of people in Louisiana want and therefore is constitutional — which is not actually how things work in this country.

“I did not know that the Ten Commandments was such a bad way for someone to live their life," Landry said. "I believe that the legislature was only following the will of the people of the state because when you look at the sheer votes that were cast in support of this bill, it was done with bipartisan support.”

It is, of course, totally fine for someone to live their lives by the Ten Commandments. I would be the last person to say that anyone is required to covet anyone else’s cattle or manservants. That being said, while we have democracy, we also have laws that protect minorities of all kinds, including religious minorities, from having their rights infringed upon by the majority.

“I think we’ve forgotten in this country that democracy actually means majority rule,” Landry continued. “When you elect people, you elect by majority. That majority gets to rule. That does not mean that if you don’t like something, you have a right to impose that which the majority likes.”

He also proposed a solution for those who don’t like the posters — tell their kids not to look at them.

“If those posters are in school and they find them so vulgar, just tell the child not to look at it,” he added.

That’s not how any of this works!

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There are no out-of-context references that can make this obviously unconstitutional thing constitutional. There just aren’t — and the only way to make it “constitutional” is to change the Constitution to allow the establishment of religion. They are welcome to try that, although I’m not so sure they can get enough of a “majority” to support it.