State Sen. Terry Johnson, R-McDermott, during an Ohio Senate session in the Senate Chamber at the Statehouse in Columbus, Ohio. (Photo by Graham Stokes for Ohio Capital Journal. Republish photo only with original story.)
Ohio’s lawmakers might decide whether to join Louisiana and Kentucky in passing laws that push public school classrooms to post the Ten Commandments. Such laws have repeatedly been struck down as unconstitutional violations of the First Amendment’s prohibition of governments’ “establishment of religion.”
Republican state Sen. Terry Johnson of McDermott thinks he can maneuver around these court precedents by claiming his bill is simply one requiring schools to post “historical displays.”
Given our current federal court leanings, he may well succeed. But in doing so his SB 34, the Historical Educational Displays Act, will institutionalize the very sort of indoctrination the GOP claims to oppose.
Johnson’s clever solution to get around a chain of Supreme Court decisions striking down such displays is to have every school board choose from a state list of “historical documents,” one of which just happens to be the Ten Commandments.
Others on this list include perennial favorites, many already gracing many classroom walls, such as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. A few less popular charters, such as the Magna Carta, and Northwest Ordinance, and the Articles of Confederation, round out the list.
While few citizens will pack into their school auditoriums to argue over whether the Magna Carta or the Northwest Ordinance should be posted in their little one’s classroom, many will fight over the Ten Commandments.
Some, of course, will fight because they believe with Thomas Jefferson that there should be a wall between the state and the church. Others will fight over whose Ten Commandments should have the privilege and stamp of authority that posting in a public space by the government provides.
It is often forgotten in the course of these debates that every Abrahamic religious tradition has a different version of the Decalogue that is found in two places in most, but not all, Bibles, the twentieth chapter of Exodus or the fifth of Deuteronomy.
Just to illustrate how even small differences of translations can produce large differences in meaning, let me look at what is often described as the Fourth Commandment, which as legally required by Louisiana reads “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.”
Of course, these are not the words that Moses told the people on Mount Horeb that God told him. According to the King James version, what Moses actually related was “But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates.” Nothing about being “holy” here.
While the King James version is widely seen by many Christians as authoritative, the Contemporary Torah, a closer English translation of the original Hebrew, chooses not the softer terms “manservant” and “maidservant” but uses “slave” instead.
The New Catholic Bible hews closer to the Hebrew as well using the phrase “nor your male slave, nor your female slave.” Likewise the bible generally used by those of the Orthodox faith also uses the word slave.
There seemed to be some desire on the part of some faiths to disguise the language of slavery with euphemism. Like the King James Version, the English Standard Version popular with American Evangelicals avoids the word “slave” and uses the word “servant” in place of the more antique “manservant.”
So, when complying with SB 34, which wording should a school board choose? Should schools teach their children to be kind to their slaves by giving them Sunday off or not?
Or should we just unleash this bill on Ohio and reopen the Bible wars of the 19th Century that violently raged over the question of whether the Catholic or King James Bibles should be used in school?
In some ways, Johnson’s end run around the Constitution is actually more threatening to the separation of church and state than Louisiana’s law that simply required the display of the Commandments.
Louisiana made no excuses for their imposition of a religious doctrine upon the schools, and such pure religious indoctrination can be readily seen for what is, the establishment of religion in violation of the First Amendment.
But SB 34 justifies the placement of the Ten Commandments as a “historical document” essential to understanding the nature of American government, falsely implying that the United States republic was founded on a particular understanding of Christianity.
In fact, of course, the Founders were well aware of how mixing church and state can spark religious fights that fracture both.
If SB 34 passes, the truth of the Founders’ wisdom will be on display as will be evident by the shouting matches and worse coming to a school board meeting near you.
YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE.