James Hirsen repeated his assigned talking points well in his June 24 Newsmax column:
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry recently signed into law a requirement that the text of the Ten Commandments be displayed in public school classrooms.
House Bill No. 71 applies to public schools from elementary to secondary and even post-secondary institutions, with an exemption for charter schools.
The Louisiana bill is the first of its kind to be passed into law, and support is currently building in Texas to pass a similar one.
While other states have attempted comparable legislation, such proposed bills have failed to make it through the legislative processes.
In an effort to emphasize the historical and foundational importance of the Ten Commandments, the Louisiana Legislature also added a provision that calls for a four-paragraph “context statement” to be posted nearby, stating that the Ten Commandments “were a prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries.”
Just because a government insists there’s nothing religious about the Ten Commandments doesn’t mean they are, and Hirsen — as a typical government-hating conservative — should probably know better than to swallow government mandates like this. Still, he’s mad that people are pointing out that Louisiana’s law forces religion on students, and he’s eager to stay on message with his fellow right-wingers:
The Ten Commandments is no ordinary piece of prose, but is instead a historical description and delineation upon which the laws of our nation are based.
The Ten Commandments detail the specifics of the “laws of nature and nature’s God,” which are set forth in the birth certificate of America, the exquisitely worded Declaration of Independence.
The declaration encompasses the laws that are “written on the heart,” the natural law that the founders of our nation imbued into our system of government, particularly our judicial branch.
The actual reason that the left is engaging in hyperbole with regard to the Ten Commandments may have to do with the challenges that the words within the Decalogue present to the left’s highly flexible standard for human behavior: moral relativism.
Rather than offering a situational ethics perspective, the Ten Commandments draw into focus the fundamental basis for the American legal system, which is expressed in the time-honored laws of Louisiana and the other 49 states.
In an April hearing for the bill, state Rep. Dodie Horton pointed out that the display of the Ten Commandments is “not preaching a Christian religion. It’s not preaching any religion. It’s teaching a moral code.”
In 1956, at the New York opening of the iconic film “The Ten Commandments,” director Cecil B. DeMille noted, “The Ten Commandments are the charter and guide of human liberty, for there can be no liberty without the law.”
And without the guardrails that uphold us, our nation’s heartbeat will no longer be heard.
It seems that Hirsen’s true intent here is to hide behind this deceptive non-religious interpretation — ironically, promoted by highly religious people — to force religion into public schools.