“This bill mandates the display of the Ten Commandments in every classroom — public elementary, secondary and post-education schools — in the state of Louisiana, because if you want to respect the rule of law, you’ve got to start from the original lawgiver, which was Moses.”
— Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry, upon signing a new law requiring schools to display the ‘Ten Commandments’ in every classroom… as quoted in a Washington Post article by Anumita Kaur, June 19, 2024.
I’ll start by saying, I want us all to respect the rule of law, which is apparently something Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry also wants us to do, after a fashion. In Louisiana, the Republican-controlled House overwhelmingly passed the bill in April, and the Republican-controlled Senate followed suit in May.
Maybe we don’t need to respect the First Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment, because they are now outdated?
That’s the great thing about the rule of law. If you control the House and the Senate, you can make your new laws, and then expect people to follow them.
Because laws are so easy to make, there were plenty of laws in the world before Moses came along. But of course Governor Landry is talking about Judaic laws, which, in fact, very few Americans follow.
You can even make up your own religious history, as Governor Landry was willing to do, when he identified Moses as “the original lawgiver”. As I recall the story, the LORD God was “the original lawgiver”; Moses was merely the messenger, and an ill-behaved messenger at that. If Governor Landry opened his Bible now and then, he could read the story himself.
(Or he could open the Quran, the central religious text of Islam? Moses happens to be a frequently mentioned individual — his name is mentioned 136 times, and his life is more thoroughly narrated than that of any other prophet. But I doubt the Governor owns a copy.)
Basically, Moses ingratiated himself with the Egyptian Pharaoh during a time when Hebrews were enslaved. The Pharaoh didn’t know that Moses was secretly one of those same Hebrews and was eventually going to lead his people out of Egypt to the Promised Land. In the story, Moses was a lousy public speaker — he had a bad stutter — so he had his brother Aaron do the talking.
(I don’t recall Charleton Heston having a stutter, but that’s Hollywood for you.)
It’s a complicated story, full of children dying and seemingly innocent people suffering plagues of frogs and locust, and waters getting parted, and people singing songs of freedom… but the important part — from Governor Landry’s perspective — took place on Mt. Sinai. The children of Israel, once they escaped Egypt, were an unruly, disobedient bunch, so the LORD (who went by the name of ‘Jehovah’ or ‘Yahweh’ depending on which version of the Bible you’re reading) inscribed ten important laws on a stone tablet, and provided them to Moses on the mountain top, in an atmosphere of fire and smoke.
So I guess, in a sense, Moses could be considered “the original lawgiver”. Lacking a legislature, he didn’t conceive the laws, but he did try to deliver them. Unfortunately, coming down from the mountain, he found God’s chosen people singing and dancing around a golden idol they’d somehow contrived to create, and Moses — being a man with apparent anger management issues — threw down the stone tablets and broke them into pieces.
The pieces currently reside inside an ‘ark of acacia wood’ at the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church in the town of Aksum… which has been “guarded by a succession of virgin monks who, once anointed, are forbidden to set foot outside the chapel grounds until they die.” (Good luck setting foot outside, once you’re dead.)
The legislators and the governor in Louisiana want all schools in the state to display a copy of the Ten Commandments in their classrooms. (Even “post-education schools”, a type of school with which I am unfamiliar.) I don’t have a big problem with this new law, but I wonder about a couple of the Commandments. Like:
Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work — you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns…
Not even livestock are allowed to work on the sabbath, for which they are probably grateful.
Is the Governor suggesting that checkout clerks will no longer be able to work at Walmart on Sunday? And the internet will stop working? That would be inconvenient.
Moses may have had his own personal issues with the Ten Commandments. Especially, this one:
You shall not murder.
The LORD later clarified that one in Exodus Chapter 21.
Whoever strikes a man so that he dies, shall be put to death.
Perhaps we ought to remind the Governor about Exodus Chapter 2?
One day, when Moses had grown up, he went out among his people and looked upon their burdens; and he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his people. He looked this way and that, and seeing no one, he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.
Maybe Moses was “the original lawgiver”. But he had some skeletons in the closet.
Don’t we all, Governor Landry?
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.