“If you want to respect the rule of law, you’ve got to start from the original lawgiver, which was Moses.” So said Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry when he signed a bill to require the Ten Commandments to be posted in every classroom in the state.
The Louisiana law has caused outrage from the left and the liberal intelligentsia. The ACLU has already announced it will be challenging the law in court as an unconstitutional establishment of religion. David French argued in The New York Times that rather than respecting the rule of law, Landry is defying it because the Supreme Court already ruled on the issue in Stone v. Graham in 1980. “To teach respect for the rule of law, he’s defying the Supreme Court?” French asked incredulously.
What French failed to mention is that in the Stone decision, the court based its ruling on the three-part “Lemon test,” which was used for decades by the Supreme Court to determine whether actions violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment. But in June of 2022, the United States Supreme Court, in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, held that the standard in the 1971 case of Lemon v. Kurtzman, long criticized by many, was in error and put the final nail in its coffin.
The Lemon test had served to turn courts into de facto censors of any form of arguably religious speech or display in the public sphere, including displays of the Ten Commandments, nativity scenes and menorahs, and other
