A decision by conservative Louisiana lawmakers to force schools to display the Ten Commandments in defiance of the Establishment Clause is just the opening salvo as Christian nationalists flex their muscles after the conservative Supreme Court opened the door to the establishment of a "theocratic state."
That is the opinion of the Guardian columnist Ed Pilkington who explained that Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has been raising the red flag that the conservative super majority on the court has been doing all they can to dismantle "the wall of separation between church and state that the framers fought to build”.
According to Pilkington, "The new law, signed on Wednesday by the hard-right governor, Jeff Landry, puts Louisiana in the vanguard of a decades-long movement to obliterate the foundational US separation of church and state. It puts wind in the sails of those who want the US to be reinvented as an overtly Christian nation, and comes in the wake of two highly contentious opinions from the highest court."
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As he pointed out, those two rulings were delivered in a period of six days in 2020 and are part of the legacy of Donald Trump who placed three of the conservative justices on the court.
Stating the conservative majority opened a "Pandora's box," he cited Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, who offered, "There’s no question that Christian nationalists are capitalizing on the recent supreme court cases. They are hopeful that the court is beyond repair and will undo years of precedent about religion in public schools.”
As Pilkington pointed out, "Carson v Makin, was delivered on 21 June 2022. In it, the conservative justices required the state of Maine to fund religious instruction in rural areas lacking a public high school," before adding that Kennedy v Bremerton, sided with a coach "who had been placed on administrative leave by his public school outside Seattle after he repeatedly ignored instructions and held prayer sessions with student players after games on the 50-yard line."
In her dissent on the Kennedy case, with the majority opinion written by Justice Nell Gorsuch, Sotomayor wrote, "In doing so, the court sets us further down a perilous path in forcing states to entangle themselves with religion, with all of our rights hanging in the balance.”
"Louisiana’s governor must have been paying attention. By signing the new Ten Commandments law he has fulfilled Sotomayor’s warning. He is taking the US down a perilous path that is all but certain to lead to the Supreme Court. The same Supreme Court that opened this Pandora’s box, and that shows no desire to close it," the Guardian columnist concluded.
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