The Republican-run Texas House of Representatives has passed a bill mandating the placing of a minimum 16-by-20-inch framed display of the Ten Commandments in each public school classroom in the state. The measure will now go to the GOP Senate, which is expected to pass it after signing off on an earlier version of the legislation and then to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott. But the real audience of the law are the nine justices of the Supreme Court of the United States.
The bill could not have been better designed to violate the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause; as a law school practice problem, it would have been considered a little ham-fisted. State legislators and Abbott’s administration are practically salivating over the prospect of the matter getting into court, where they can defend their godliness against the heathens trying to prevent the good people from exercising their faith.
This is a twisted view of the language of the First Amendment that takes it to be not a firewall between church and state but a shackling of the state’s ability to regulate religious expression, even when it is being mandated. Even if they lose in court — and they really should, quickly — Texas GOP policymakers still win.
A court loss gives them the ability to campaign and fundraise off the fact that they were foiled by “liberal judges” who will be framed as taking the commandments out of the classroom as opposed to reasonably blocking their inclusion in the first place. They’re also counting on, frankly, editorials much like this one, as they take scolding from civil society as the marker of a job well done. It’s a good racket.
There is some irony that the lawmakers working on the bill with preliminary votes on both Saturday and Sunday, the Jewish Sabbath and the Christian Sabbath, violated the commandment to keep the Sabbath day holy. That’s just one more indication that this isn’t about the genuine exercise of religious belief, but about the amassing of power, using the government to signal that one ideology isn’t not only protected but dominant and waging the never-ending culture war that the modern Republican Party has taken upon itself to wage incessantly.