South Dakota’s House Education Committee passed a bill Friday mandating the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom, as well as being taught as part of the core curriculum.
Senate Bill 51 passed through the House Education Committee on a vote of 8 to 7 on Feb. 7, according to the Rapid City Journal. The bill will now move to the House Floor, where legislators will vote whether to move it forward once again. Should the bill clear the floor, it’ll go directly to the state’s Republican Gov. Larry Rhoden.
The bill was introduced by Republican Sen. John Carley, who “said his goal is to provide students a greater understanding of how the Ten Commandments shaped the moral and legislative pillars of founding documents,” the outlet reported. Should the legislation pass, it would require every classroom to have a three-part, roughly 225-word statement near an 8-by-14 inch poster of the Ten Commandments.
“I am thankful the Ten Commandments has been passed through the South Dakota Legislature. This foundational content has been so instrumental in the foundations of America – it’s great to see this come back to our public square. I appreciate the support of all of those still encouraging this to move forward,” Carley told Million Voices when asked for a statement.
If the legislation is passed and signed by Rhoden, there are concerns it’ll be followed by heavy litigation, as it has in states like Louisiana. Such potential cases have to fight against a massive change in our legal system that happened in June 2022. This change shifted America back on track to religious freedoms.
In June 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 6-to-3 in favor of high school football coach Joseph Kennedy’s right to pray at the 5-yard line at the end of each game, claimed NPR. “Respect for religious expressions is indispensable to life in a free and diverse Republic. Here, a government entity sought to punish an individual for engaging in a personal religious observance, based on a mistaken view that it has a duty to suppress religious observances even as it allows comparable secular speech. The Constitution neither mandates nor tolerates that kind of discrimination. Mr. Kennedy is entitled to summary judgment on his religious exercise and free speech claims,” wrote Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch at the time.
The decision overturned a short-held legal precedent regarding the constitutionality of public religious displays. It’s believed the Ten Commandments were a prominent part of American education for almost three centuries prior to 1980, when the prior legal precedent was held against it. The first purely American educational textbook “New England Primer” was published by Benjamin Harris in Boston in 1690, featuring an in-depth section on the Ten Commandments.
In the context of American history, 45 years, from 1980 to 2025, without having the Ten Commandments in our education system doesn’t seem like a very long time, especially when you take into account it was part of our curriculum from at least 1690 to 1980 (that’s 290 years). But ask yourself: how do the last 45 years compare to the previous 290?
North Dakota, Montana, Tennessee, Oklahoma and more are all poised to bring God back into their classrooms in 2025. In Louisiana, the law requires a poster-sized printout of the Ten Commandments in all K-12 public school classrooms and state-funded universities, according to the First Liberty Institute.
The legal challenge in Louisiana was brought by several families with children in public schools, all of whom are represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the ACLU of Louisiana, Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the Freedom from Religion Foundation.
“Unfortunately for the ACLU, their entire case is built on sand. Stone v. Graham is a relic of a previous time when the Lemon test censored religion from public life and is no longer good law,” First Liberty general counsel Hiram Sasser said in a statement.
