Evangelicals Behaving Badly...

[raison de arizona]

If only they would live by them and not just insist on posting them in classrooms.

Louisiana Requires Ten Commandments to Be Displayed in Every Public Classroom
A law signed by Gov. Jeff Landry on Wednesday makes the state the only one with such a mandate. Critics have vowed to mount a constitutional challenge.

Gov. Jeff Landry signed legislation on Wednesday requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in every public classroom in Louisiana, making the state the only one with such a mandate and reigniting the debate over how porous the boundary between church and state should be.

Critics, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, have vowed a legal fight. But it is a battle that proponents are prepared, and in many ways, eager, to take on.

The legislation is part of a broader campaign by conservative Christian groups to amplify public expressions of faith, and provoke lawsuits that could reach the Supreme Court, where they expect a friendlier reception than in years past. That presumption is rooted in recent rulings, particularly one in 2022 in which the court sided with a high school football coach who argued that he had a constitutional right to pray at the 50-yard line after his team’s games.

“The climate is certainly better,” said Charles C. Haynes, a senior fellow at the Freedom Forum and a scholar with an expertise in religious liberty and civil discourse.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/19/us/l ... rooms.html

[zekeb]

I wonder which of the three versions of the Ten Commandments was specified in the law?

[northland10]

I love the smell idolatry in the morning.

[W. Kevin Vicklund]

"The Satanic Temple, please pick up the courtesy phone"

[RTH10260]

Pastafarians - time for a new cookup

[bill_g]

[AndyinPA]

Loved that movie!

[poplove]

Loved that movie!

Me too! My favorite scene!

[bob]

I wonder which of the three versions of the Ten Commandments was specified in the law?

I serve to live:

[chancery]

From the substack of Princeton historian Kevin Kruse https://kevinmkruse.substack.com/p/thou-shalt-not

When I saw today’s news that Louisiana has become the first state to mandate the display of the Ten Commandments in all public school classrooms, I thought it sounded a lot like the 1950s campaign to put the Ten Commandments in classrooms that I chronicled in One Nation Under God.

But I didn’t realize until I read this post
[https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivi ... n-schools/] that Louisiana is literally using that exact campaign as its model.

Which is hilarious because that model was developed as a promotional campaign for the Cecil B. DeMille blockbuster film, The Ten Commandments.

Charlton Heston 10 Commandments promotion.jpg (239.22 KiB) Viewed 787 times

No, really. That’s Charlton Heston on the left there, at one of the many dedications.

Here’s the story:

Cecil B. DeMille believed he could best serve the conservative religious revival of the postwar era with his considerable talents as a filmmaker. In August 1952, he announced that his next film would be an epic production of The Ten Commandments. The director had already produced a film on the topic three decades earlier, but wanted to tackle it again. “I feel that this subject is particularly timely today,” he announced to the press. “There is a spiritual resurgence throughout the world. I want to do my part in furthering this spiritual mobilization both in countries where the state has not tried to replace God and in countries where it apparently has.” (Reporters did not ask into which category the director believed his own country lay.)


In promoting the film, DeMille and his crew presented The Ten Commandments as a true story grounded in the hard facts of history and the holy truths of the Bible. A year before its premiere, the film’s screenwriter Aeneas MacKenzie vouched for its accuracy in a lengthy piece for the New York Times. He recalled how DeMille made his “team of scenarists” aware of the solemnity of their duty. “There is no place for the usual fiction in a picture that deals with the interpretations and circumstances from which not one – but three! – of the world’s great religions have sprung,” the director had instructed. “You may dramatize the scenes in any way you wish, but whatever episodes you employ must be justified to me in terms of recognized authorities. You are to invent nothing out of your own talented imaginations. “ (At this, MacKenzie remembered, DeMille had added a flourish from the pharaoh: “So let it be written, gentlemen! So let it be done!”) The director, however, had issued an impossible demand, for there simply was no record for much of Moses’ life. The biblical account introduced Moses as a baby along the Nile and then returned to him three decades later, with no mention of his life in between. For a film that claimed simply to reveal God’s words, much of its script would have to be written by man.

To preserve the illusion of historical accuracy, DeMille instructed his head of research Henry Noerdlinger to find the documentation that would be needed to fend off religious and academic critics. Noerdlinger cast his net broadly, drawing on ancient rabbinical texts, early Christian narratives and the Koran. Most of these accounts had been composed centuries after the Book of Exodus, leading the researcher to refer to them cautiously as “traditions” rather than “histories.” But he used them all the same, filling in the missing decades of Moses’ life with a story quite literally made for Hollywood. In his telling, the Hebrew prophet who defiantly challenged the pharaoh had grown up with him as a fellow prince of Egypt. This was a version of events that had eluded biblical scholars in three major faiths for millennia, but DeMille’s team insisted it was true, or true enough. They pointed, as proof, not to the quality of Noerdlinger’s work, but the quantity, noting repeatedly that he had consulted some 1,644 sources in his research.


Yet The Ten Commandments’ most lasting legacy was its marketing campaign. As he prepared for the debut, DeMille worked with the Fraternal Order of Eagles on an ambitious plan to “present plaques of the Ten Commandments on state capitol grounds, on courthouse lawns, public parks and other strategic places so that as many people as possible might view the laws of God.” The organization had been distributing copies of the Ten Commandments for years, inspired by an incident in which Judge E.J. Ruegemer of St. Cloud, Minnesota, learned that a juvenile defendant in his courtroom had never heard of the laws and “sentenced” the boy to learn and obey them. Ruegemer, the head of the Eagles’ Youth Guidance Commission, persuaded the fraternal order to take up the cause.


When he learned of the Eagles’ campaign, DeMille immediately wanted to join in. A consummate showman, the director urged the Eagles to work on a grander scale. Instead of modest scrolls, he suggested the organization craft larger stone monuments that more closely resembled the tablets of Exodus. In the interests of accuracy, DeMille even sent Ruegemer a sample of the granite he had carved from Mount Sinai during his personal pilgrimage to the holy site. Sharing the filmmaker’s eye for detail, the judge reported back that the Eagles had decided to build their monoliths “from Wisconsin red granite, believing it to more closely resemble the Mount Sinai granite than our Minnesota reds.” In the spring and summer of 1955, the fraternal organization began dedicating these new stone monuments at sites like the lawn of the county courthouse in Evansville, Indiana. Soon after, DeMille and the Eagles joined forces. The Eagles wanted “to offer to Paramount Pictures our cooperation in publicizing and urging membership and families to see the forthcoming Ten Commandment film.” In return, DeMille promised to use the full influence of his publicity department, including personal appearances by stars of the film, to promote the Eagles’ work.

Together, DeMille and the Eagles established Ten Commandments monuments across America. In 1955, for instance, the organization dedicated one as the cornerstone for an addition to Milwaukee’s City Hall. “It is unique,” Judge Ruegemer announced, for “this is the first time in the history of our country that the Ten Commandments in the form of a monolith will appear as part of a public building.” He credited the idea to DeMille, who wanted “to see the Eagles present plaques of the Ten Commandments on state capitol grounds, on courthouse lawns, public parks and other strategic places so that as many people as possible might view the laws of God.” To underscore the director’s importance in the process, both Donald Hayne, DeMille’s executive assistant, and Yul Brynner, who played Rameses II in the film, also addressed the Milwaukee crowd. “The need for the Ten Commandments is even greater today that it was 3,000 years ago in Moses’ time,” Brynner insisted. “They are the cornerstone on which our freedom rests.”

Charlton Heston, who starred as Moses, appeared at another monument’s dedication in June 1956. Under a broiling sun, a crowd of five thousand gathered to witness the installation of a monolith at the International Peace Garden located on the American-Canadian border in North Dakota. The stone symbolized, in the words of DeMille’s public relations men, “the principle of freedom under God on which the governments of the two countries are based.” Following performances by the North Dakota Governor’s Band and a Scottish bagpipe group from Manitoba, Heston and Ruegemer unveiled the Eagles’ gift. Carved from red granite, the monument bore not only the words of the Decalogue but also images of the American and Canadian flags. “The Commandments monolith,” a studio release claimed, “not only serves as a reminder to visitors of God’s law and their need to live by it, but of the concepts on which the laws of these nations are based – Freedom, democracy, justice, honor under God.” (The concept of “freedom under God” was familiar to Heston. As a “devoted member” of Fifield’s First Congregational Church, the actor had delivered some of Moses’ dialogue from the film to worshippers in its sanctuary.)


Although generally welcomed, the Eagles’ campaign was not without its critics. Originally, the organization prided itself on the support its activities received from Protestant, Catholic and Jewish clergy alike. But as the campaign began to focus on placing monuments in prominent public locations, cracks appeared in this coalition. In July 1957, a Minneapolis rabbi who had long supported the Eagles’ efforts wrote Ruegemer to say that his support had its limits. He praised the “highest motives” of the organization and said he still supported the placement of monuments on “private premises.” But the rabbi believed “efforts to place these plaques in institutions and places, state sponsored, represents a serious threat to and departure from the classic American principle of separation of church and state.” The American Jewish Congress felt the same way, he noted pointedly. Individual chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union, meanwhile, raised similar objections. In June 1957, its Ohio branch sent a polite letter of protest to the mayor of Youngstown about a proposed monument there. “The Eagles’ gesture is generous and public-spirited,” the letter read, but placement of such a religious icon on public land would “conflict with the healthy American tradition of separation of church and state.” While such complaints would, decades later, place these Ten Commandments monuments at the center of landmark legal struggles, at the time they were easily dismissed. The Eagles proceeded with their work, ultimately establishing nearly 4,000 monuments across America.

So when you hear the governor of Louisiana insisting that this effort is somehow reviving a tradition that was “a prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries,” remember that’s a considerable stretch.

They’re reviving a tradition that was crafted in Hollywood.

[MN-Skeptic]

ACLU
@ACLU

BREAKING: We’re suing Louisiana for requiring all public schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom.

Public schools are not Sunday schools.

Along with @ACLUofLouisiana, @americansunited and @FFRF, we’ll fight with everything we have to stop this blatantly unconstitutional law.

[AndyinPA]

From what I read somewhere, Louisiana will welcome the suits, as they think they've got a Supreme Court on their side now.

[MN-Skeptic]

I've always thought it interesting that some Christians tout the 10 Commandments as the ultimate guide to follow when that is not at all what Jesus said.

Mark 12:28-31:

28 One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”

29 “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ 31 The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”

Of course, loving your neighbor as yourself means loving the poor, the immigrants, the atheists and Muslims, the Blacks and the Chinese, the lesbians and the transgenders, etc. If you do love your neighbor as yourself, it goes without saying that you'd follow the 10 Commandments.

I DARE politicians to replace the 10 Commandments in classrooms with a giant sign saying "Love your neighbor as yourself." Since they don't agree with that, it'll never happen.

[raison de arizona]

From what I read somewhere, Louisiana will welcome the suits, as they think they've got a Supreme Court on their side now.

They’re kinda right. Unfortunately. We’ll see.

[Foggy]

I DARE politicians to replace the 10 Commandments in classrooms with a giant sign saying "Love your neighbor as yourself." Since they don't agree with that, it'll never happen.

Yeah, if'n Jesus came back today, we'd just have to crucify him all over again.

Not 100% certain what happens if Charlton Heston comes back.

[bill_g]

If Charlton Heston comes back, he'd make a cameo appearance on AMC The Walking Dead.

[Rolodex]

I'd like to challenge those politicians to post the Sermon on the Mount instead of the 10 commandments. OTOH I guess the 10 covers Christians and Jews. The Muslims should sue to get their words in there. The Satanic Church usually comes through on this stuff, too.

This has lost before, but I also heard that they're hopeful this time because "the judiciary is different now." It wasn't that long ago, however, that Judge Roy Moore got kicked off the AL Supreme Court for hauling in a washing machine-sized rock with the 10 commandments and installing it in the SC building.

[raison de arizona]

Landry on Separation of Church and State: I challenge anyone who says that to go find me those words in the first amendment. They don't exist. It's a metaphor that was breathed into the first amendment by liberal supreme court in the 1930s.

[raison de arizona]

Worth noting is that Landry refused hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Feds to feed hungry children in LA. Which I suspect is what this is referring to.

[RTH10260]

as mentioned in the #45 thread

Texas Megachurch Pastor Resigns After Sexual Abuse Allegations
Robert Morris, a faith adviser to the Trump White House, resigned from Gateway Church after he was accused of abusing a child in the 1980s.

By Orlando Mayorquín
Published June 18, 2024Updated June 20, 2024

Robert Morris, the founder of a Texas megachurch and a faith adviser to the Trump White House, has resigned from his job as its senior pastor, the church said on Tuesday, days after he was accused of sexually abusing a child in the 1980s.

The Board of Elders of Gateway Church, based in Dallas, said in a statement that it had accepted Mr. Morris’s resignation. The board said it had hired a law firm to conduct an independent investigation into the abuse allegations made public last week by a woman who is now 54. Mr. Morris could not immediately be reached for comment on Tuesday night.

The statement did not say if any related charges had been filed against Mr. Morris, whose church says it has more than 100,000 active attendees. Messages sent to Haynes and Boone, the firm hired by the church, did not immediately respond to messages.

Over the weekend, The Christian Post, a Christian news outlet based in Washington, D.C., quoted Mr. Morris as saying that he had engaged in “inappropriate sexual behavior with a young lady.”

“When I was in my early twenties, I was involved in inappropriate sexual behavior with a young lady in a home where I was staying,” Mr. Morris, 62, told The Christian Post. “It was kissing and petting and not intercourse, but it was wrong. This behavior happened on several occasions over the next few years.”

The relationship was reported last week by The Wartburg Watch, a Christian watchdog publication. The website said that Mr. Morris had sexually abused a girl, beginning when she was 12 years old.




https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/18/us/p ... hurch.html

[raison de arizona]

"faith adviser to the Trump White House"

Only the best people...

[RTH10260]

Author Of “10 Commandments Bill” GOES OFF on CNN Host

Occupy Democrats
21 Jun 2024

The author of Louisiana’s “10 Commandments Bill,” Republican State Representative Lauren Ventrella, just exploded on a CNN anchor over a piercing question about her controversial bill. It really is a very telling reaction…

[sugar magnolia]

They won't have to worry about the 30% of their state who can't read, so there's that.

[bill_g]

If it's *just* a historical document, it can be held in the library in a book along side other historical documents. Codify that. Thou shalt have a book with the Ten Commandments in it on a shelf in the school library. There you go. See how easy that is?

[pipistrelle]

Some may not see it as a historical document.

The Kama Sutra is a historical document.