An Oklahoma legislator wants to bring the Ten Commandments to public school classrooms.
“The desire is to give our schoolchildren an honest history of our nation,” said Rep. Jim Olsen of Sequoyah County, who sponsored the bill. “The Ten Commandments is a founding document of the nation, and I believe our children need to know that, need to be aware of it.”
House Bill 1006 would display the Ten Commandments on posters visible to all students. Unlike recent mandates from the state that required spending millions on Bibles, Olsen said his proposal is free.
“Basically, there would be no public money involved. You only have to put them up if the posters are donated,” Olsen said. “There’s specifications in the bill to make sure it’s large enough so that anybody who wants to read it can see it.”
Multiple states authored similar legislation around displaying the Ten Commandments in schools.
One difference in Oklahoma’s bill and a nearly identical Louisiana bill is that the Bayou State legislation required the poster to be 11 inches wide and 14 inches tall. The Oklahoma bill says the commandments need to be displayed on a poster that is 16 inches wide by 20 inches tall.
A district judge struck the Louisiana bill down last year. The attorney general of Louisiana is appealing to a federal circuit court.
Olsen said a 2022 Supreme Court ruling could be helpful in defending the Ten Commandments legislation. In Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, the court ruled that a high school coach praying with his students after a football game was exercising free speech.
“What that did is overturned the Lemon law,” Olsen said. “After the Lemon ruling, anything that was remotely religious was most likely to be forbidden.”
The Supreme Court largely abandoned the Lemon test with the Kennedy v. Bremerton decision, calling it abstract and ahistorical in their ruling.
The “Lemon test,” from the Lemon v. Kurtzman Supreme Court ruling in 1971, had three guidelines to see if government "assistance" violated the U.S. Constitution’s mandate against favoring one religion over another or creating a national religion:
- The primary purpose of the assistance is secular
- The assistance must neither promote nor inhibit religion
- There is no excessive entanglement between church and state
Olsen said the legal switch could make his legislation possible.
“The landscape for this kind of thing has changed,” Olsen said.
House Bill 1006 has been referred to the appropriations and budget education subcommittee. The bill must pass out of committee before it can go to the floor for a full vote.
