Do Americans have the right to not practice religion?
When the question is phrased like that, even most fervent religious believers out there would likely concede that, yes, non-belief (like belief itself) must qualify as a fundamental American right.
Yet that right is under frontal attack, from a religiously driven political movement operating under the premise that if government doesn’t promote religion, it is by definition attacking it.
That premise is not only backward but is a slippery slope toward theocracy. The latest slide comes in Louisiana, with a new law requiring that every public school and college post the Ten Commandments in every classroom.
Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed the law Wednesday. It makes his state the first to test the Constitution’s church-state separation in this manner since a U.S. Supreme Court opinion in 1980 that found a Kentucky requirement to display the commandments in public schools violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment.