“We are in the civil rights movement of our generation,” Alanah Odoms said of the battle to oppose posting the Ten Commandments in every Louisiana school classroom.
Odoms, executive director of the ACLU of Louisiana, said the Ten Commandments law is the “canary in the coal mine” for a Christian nationalist agenda.
It is an “egregious attempt” to tear down the wall of separation between church and state, added Heather Weaver, senior staff attorney for the ACLU’s Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief.
Rachel Laser
And it is “a prime example of the Christian nationalism that is on the march across this country,” added Rachel Laser, president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
The three were among about eight people who spoke on a June 24 press call to announce a coalition of nine Louisiana families has sued to stop implementation of House Bill 71, which mandates posting a particular translation of the Ten Commandments in every school classroom. The bill was signed into law by Gov. Jeff Landry June 19.
Critics say the law forces upon a diverse student body a particular version of Jewish and Christian teaching and is therefore unconstitutional. The First Amendment prohibits the “establishment” of any religious belief with government support.
However, the Christian nationalist movement sweeping the nation fueled by evangelical Christians and MAGA politics contends without evidence that the United States was founded as and should be run as a “Christian nation.” Therefore, evangelical Christians should be given rights others do not have.
“HB 71 is contradictory to our founding principles and to the strident articulation of freedom within the First Amendment’s Free Exercise clause, despite what we are told,” Odom said. “It is in fact religious indoctrination. It scoffs at the Establishment Clause’s neutrality mandate and elevates the governor and the government to the chief decider of a child’s faith. And this we believe is unconstitutional.
“We are at an inflection point in the state of Louisiana but also in the United States.”
“We are at an inflection point in the state of Louisiana but also in the United States. This is a reckoning that has been happening and that has been in the making since the Civil Rights Movement of the ’50s and ’60s. In fact, I would suggest that we are in the civil rights movement of our generation.
“This is a choice that we will make, and the choice is about whether we move toward light hope and freedom, or whether we choose to live in darkness and promote discrimination and despair,” she continued. “Make no mistake: If we want to protect our freedom to choose, we have to adopt an orientation of freedom, a credo of freedom, even a spirit of freedom. We must be aware when religion is parading as repression. A spirit of freedom means we care about all of the people that make up ‘the people.’ It means we don’t take away a person’s destiny to choose what they believe, who they want to become or who they love. It means we protect and invest in our children by teaching them core values like kindness, compassion, empathy and peace. We teach our children by showing them where we have fallen short of the aspirational principles of the Constitution, not by hiding it from them.”
Laser set the Louisiana law in a national context.
“It’s not just happening in Louisiana; it’s happening from Texas to West Virginia, from Florida to Idaho,” she explained. “Politicians nationwide are trying to force religious displays into public schools, but that’s not all. They’re passing laws to replace school counselors with religious chaplains. They’re passing laws to allow teachers and coaches to pray with students, laws to allow teachers to teach creationism in science class and laws to ban books and censor curricula that feature LGBTQ people and racial and religious minorities. And at the same time as they’re imposing their religious beliefs on public school children, they’re forcing taxpayers to fund private religious education.
“These Christian nationalist laws violate the religious freedom principles that are core to this country’s founding, that everyone should be free to live as themselves and believe as they choose so long as they don’t harm others,” Laser said. “To be clear, Christian nationalism is not the same as Christianity.”
The hope of the plaintiffs challenging the law is to keep it from being enacted this fall, said John Youngwood, co-chair of the litigation department at the law firm Simpson Thatcher and Bartlett. The goal of today’s legal action is to gain a temporary injunction while the law is being challenged, he said.
“We hope to prosecute that preliminary injunction with all speed and work toward a hearing as soon as possible this summer so that this law can never effectively be implemented for the children of Louisiana.”
Plaintiffs in the lawsuit include: Unitarian Universalist minister Darcy Roake, her husband Adrian Van Young, and their two children; Jeff Simms, a Presbyterian (USA) minister, and his three children; nonreligious parents Jennifer Harding and Benjamin Owens and their child; Erin and David Hawley and their two children, a Unitarian Universalist family; Dustin McCrory, an atheist, and his three children; Christy Alkire, who is nonreligious, and her child; and Joshua Herlands, who is Jewish and has two elementary-age children.
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