Thou shalt put them on display

Eight months ago, Louisiana state Rep. Dodie Horton sat in her Bossier Parish office basking in the afterglow of a successful reelection campaign. When she opened her email, she spotted what turned out to be a significant message. It was from WallBuilders, a national nonprofit that promotes what it calls America’s historical Christian roots. Horton clicked on it. A paragraph about the Ten Commandments caught the third-term representative’s eye, and she leaned in closer to her computer screen. Before she knew it, the bill-proposing side of her brain was working faster than a Cajun cook during crawfish season.

Horton, a Southern Baptist with three grandchildren in Louisiana’s public schools, remembers when the Ten Commandments hung on her classroom wall in Shreveport’s Woodlawn High School. She says her motivation for introducing what became a controversial bill was simple. “Get God’s moral standard back in front of our children, because right now, they don’t seem to have a standard.”

She succeeded. Last month, Louisiana became the first state in more than 40 years to require public schools and universities to display the Ten Commandments. The new law mandates that by Jan. 1, 2025, a framed display of a state-approved version of the Ten Commandments at least 11 by 14 inches in size with “large, easily readable font” be put in every public school building and classroom, kindergarten to college. No public funds will be used in the effort.

Other GOP-led state legislatures have pushed similar bills and failed: Oklahoma’s HB 2962 died in February. In March, Utah lawmakers watered down their version to simply adding the Ten Commandments—as well as the Magna Carta—to an optional list of historical documents teachers can choose to use.

That left observers of Louisiana’s recent accomplishment scratching their heads and asking a question: How’d they do it?

Horton points to 2022’s Kennedy v. Bremerton ruling, a Supreme Court decision favorable to the expression of faith in the public square. She says it rearranged the legal lines. “For 50 years humanists have pretty much had free rein over our education system,” Horton maintains. “It’s time to get back to our tradition.” By tradition, she means the kind of public sentiment that engraved the Ten Commandments inside the facilities of the highest court in the land, as well as in those of courts throughout the country. Visitors to state capitols can’t help but run into Moses and the two tablets, too. “You won’t find a more historical and traditional document than the Ten Commandments,” Horton contends.

Still, she admits having a Republican supermajority in Louisiana’s House and Senate, along with a newly elected Republican governor, gave her confidence to proceed. Horton even goes as far as saying she predicted “a slam dunk.” But when she notified staff of her intention, the first order of business was to take a hard look at Texas. Last year, similar legislation in that state failed just before reaching the finish line. Horton wanted to know what Louisiana needed to do differently.

Staff attorneys worked to craft a bill that would be “in the right posture,” Horton said. Then others contributed.

“When you pre-file a bill, it goes online. Different people make suggestions, and we had help from people across the country who felt this could be model legislation if we got it right. We amended it again and again to focus on its historical value and significance to our country,” Horton explains.

Gene Mills of the Louisiana Family Forum also offered assistance. His organization helped Horton pass a 2023 bill requiring “In God We Trust” posters be displayed in classrooms. And the Forum paved the way for legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom’s involvement.

But this time, Mills knew the stakes were high. Every word of HB 71 had to be strategic. He has no qualms about stating the Forum’s intention. “We prepared for the challenge, because our goal wasn’t a legislative success. It was to set precedent that if heard in the U.S. Supreme Court, under scrutiny, would prevail.”

It’s not clear how many people sitting in Committee Room 1 at the Baton Rouge State Capitol on April 4 understood that. But the day’s agenda may have been a predictor—Horton’s bill was first on the schedule. She introduced it about 12 minutes into the Committee on Education meeting. Some half an hour later, she finished answering questions.

That was the first major hoop. It’s notable that Louisiana lawmakers held a special session to deal with burgeoning crime in the state just weeks earlier. One eventual co-sponsor of the Ten Commandments bill, Rep. Sylvia Taylor, mentioned the need for a more structured society during the April 4 discussion. Perhaps crime was on her mind.

“We need to do something in the schools to bring people back to where they need to be,” she conceded.

Taylor, 74, is a Democrat. Her willingness to get behind Horton was evidence of the bipartisan support that allowed the bill to progress without hiccups. Republican co-sponsor Mike Bayham recalls another vote on HB 71 on April 12. He was sitting adjacent to two Democrats.

“We call ourselves the back row boys, because our desks are back against the railing. So we chitchat quite a bit. They were telling me how they were going to vote,” he says. All three men pushed the button in favor of passage. Bayham remembers nothing dramatic happened afterward. “We have so many bills to deal with. There’s no spiking the football. It never occurred to us that this thing was going to be some culture-­shattering issue.”

But it has been. Since Gov. Jeff Landry signed the bill on June 19, Horton has been in the hot seat. “I’ve never known this level of evil attacks,” she says, referring to a barrage of emails and phone calls. “‘How dare I,’ you know. But you don’t do anything alone in the legislature. I’ve never seen the left so fearful of a change.”

Civil rights groups have decried the new law, calling it a violation of the separation between church and state. Within five days of its passage, attorneys with the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and the New York City law firm Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett filed a lawsuit on behalf of nine “multi-faith families” in Louisiana with children in public schools.

Meanwhile, Gene Mills is preparing to follow the law’s command. “The governor just called and wanted to know if we could go ahead and get the process going. I said, ‘Governor, don’t you think we ought to make sure we pass our case first?’” Landry didn’t hesitate, Mills said.

“But we still have to design, print, and distribute them,” Mills added, referring to the posters. They also have to raise private funds to pay for them.