WaPo: “In a 5-to-4 decision, the Supreme Court has rejected a law requiring the placement of the Ten Commandments in public schools.
“The pre-eminent purpose for posting the Ten Commandments on schoolroom walls is plainly religious in nature,” the court’s unsigned decision stated. “The Ten Commandments are undeniably a sacred text in the Jewish and Christian faiths, and no legislative recitation of a supposed secular purpose can blind us to that fact.”
It was eventually revealed that the author of the decision in Stone v. Graham was Justice William J. Brennan Jr. You are probably aware that Brennan is not a sitting justice; he died in 1997. That’s because the determination that the law at issue — passed in Kentucky in 1978 — was unconstitutional came not this week but in the year 1980.
It is worth revisiting because, on Wednesday, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry (R) signed legislation that similarly mandates the placement of copies of the Ten Commandments in schoolrooms. At a signing ceremony, Landry suggested that the impetus was not boosting religion but, instead, bolstering the legal system.”