Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
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Arkansas took one big step closer to mandating the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom Monday, with the house approving SB 433 in a 71-20 vote.
SB 433 passed through Arkansas’ Senate just under a month ago, and advanced out of the House committee on April 2, according to Word and Way. The majority vote from the Republican-controlled House now sends the bill directly to the desk of Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders to be signed.
Once signed, SB 433 mandates that schools throughout the state display a poster of the Ten Commandments in every classroom and teach the historical significance of the text to Arkansas students. One writer for the Arkansas Times argued that this means “readers in classrooms around the state will soon be asking their teachers what ‘adultery’ means,” which feels fairly harmless given the gender indoctrination happening in millions of other classrooms, particularly given that these words come directly from God.
Separation of Church & State Ended In 2022
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 or so compare to the previous 290?
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