The crises afflicting America's young people ā school shootings, social isolation, skyrocketing rates of anxiety and depression ā won't be solved overnight or with any single fix. Still, something has to be done.
That's why I'm encouraged that lawmakers in Louisian passed a law to post the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. It shouldnāt raise any eyebrows, but the law was challenged by the ACLU as violating the Constitution's protections for religious freedom.
The entire bench for the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans is now reviewing this challenge, and its ruling carries unusual weight. It could greenlight the efforts of other states to welcome religious significance back to schools or cement a strict separationist vision of education for years to come.
As detailed in an amicus brief I filed in support of ¶¶Ņõh, the Supreme Court has made clear in recent years that courts should examine history and tradition when evaluating questions about religion in public life. And recent scholarship shows that passive displays of the Ten Commandments would never have been considered an "establishment of religion" by the founders.
Unfortunately, courts have long misunderstood a metaphor in Thomas Jefferson's 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists, citing the "wall of separation between church and state." Jefferson himself was not a strict separationist. More importantly, Jefferson didn't help draft or ratify the First Amendment. We need not privilege one man's political correspondence over the actual intent of those who wrote and ratified our Constitution's protections for religious freedom.
Additional historical support for displaying the Ten Commandments abounds.
The First Federal Congress appointed congressional chaplains, passed laws stating "Religion, Morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government," and requested President George Washington issue his famous 1789 Thanksgiving Proclamation giving thanks for divine providence in guiding the nation.
Andrea Picciotti-Bayer
And for centuries, education in America incorporated religious and moral instruction. The most popular textbooks used by tutors during the founding era all included the Ten Commandments.
In recent years, the Supreme Court has been methodically correcting decades of earlier rulings that treated religious displays as automatically unconstitutional. When the court held that a football coach had a constitutional right to pray at midfield after games, it threw out a legal test these earlier decisions relied upon, emphasizing that learning to tolerate religious expression is essential to democratic citizenship.
And last term, the court vindicated religious parents' right to opt their children out of mandatory instruction using LGBTQI+ storybooks. Both ¶¶Ņõh and a similar Texas law direct only a passive display of the Ten Commandments in classrooms, not active instruction or mandatory recitation.
Today's court also recognizes that exclusions based on religious character constitute discrimination that is "odious to our Constitution."
The version of the Ten Commandments that ¶¶Ņõh mandates ā which the Supreme Court has recognized as nonsectarian ā can also be read according to Jewish, Catholic or Protestant traditions. Acknowledging that our legal system has religious roots doesn't privilege one faith over others. It simply tells our history.
This matters because children need moral anchors. They need to learn that life has meaning beyond social media likes, that other people matter, that some things are right and wrong. The Ten Commandments ā don't murder, don't steal, honor your parents ā represent baseline moral principles.
States don't have to mandate displays of the Ten Commandments. But the Constitution doesn't prevent those like ¶¶Ņõh that choose to do so.
Schoolchildren struggling with isolation, violence and moral confusion need guidance, not a sanitized public square. The Fifth Circuit can vindicate the efforts of ¶¶Ņõh and offer a legal roadmap for the balanced integration of faith back into America's schools.
For parents watching their children struggle, that roadmap can't come soon enough.