The Pending Folly of the Supreme Court with the Ten Commandments

Moses Coming Down from Mount Sinai, Gustav Doré

My public high school in Maryland had a copy of the Ten Commandments on the wall in the lobby. I first noticed it there some time between 2004 and 2006. The building was in the process of being demolished and replaced in phases and it was hanging somewhere near the stairwell that no longer exists.

It was the same lobby with the massive brawl where a kid got brutally stabbed with a box cutter. The same school with the pedophile choir teacher who was in some kind of situationship with one of the leads in the musical. He ended up getting arrested for groping and soliciting a girl at another school in the district a decade later. The same school district where the D.A.R.E. officer ended up getting a DUI. The same town whose police department killed my father in a police chase. The same police department that got the boot by the DEA because of how corrupt the department was with drugs.

The Ten Commandments on the wall in my high school was the most meaningless and useless gesture by whichever church paid to have them put up. I think there was a plaque or something that identified which one. I just remember it was in a cheap 8x10 frame that probably came from Goodwill. Like everything else about the building, it was dirty, shoddy, and out of place.

It takes a lot more than a 10 cent bulk printout of the Ten Commandments to make people's lives better. People who insist gestures like this have any meaningful impact are only doing it because they don't want to give people what they need to survive. They want to feel morally superior to others. And it doesn't take a lot to do that. A yellowing copy of the Ten Commandments with hideous typography is more than enough to give a certain type of religious person all the bloated self-importance they could possibly want.

Christianity isn't interested in protecting religious freedom. They're interested in establishing religious privilege. They want the privilege to assert themselves and their primacy in society through the rules they're allowed to break, like putting the Ten Commandments in public schools.

I say this as someone who is deeply religious and who abides by the Ten Commandments. The life I live and my willingness to govern myself, without inflicting force or coercion on others, is how I make the case for the Ten Commandments. Not some stupid, meaningless paper on the wall. 

I prayed over my free lunches at school that conservative Christians were constantly saying I didn't have a right to eat. I read my scriptures every day in every classrooms all over the building. Everyone who knew me understood how important my faith was to me because they saw me living it. Nothing prevented me from bringing my prayers and scriptures into my school day. That freedom already exists.

What didn't exist until now was that I couldn't make that decision for or about anyone else, and the people bullying me about my faith at school couldn't make that decision for me. Until now.

As a person of faith, I don't see anything about this as a win. This is an invitation for churches to interfere with public schools and their operations. It will be abused by the worst authoritarian tendencies in religious organizations who don't abide by the Ten Commandments anyway.

If they did, they wouldn't be so gleeful about this administration's bearing false witness about our immigrant neighbors, who they're abusing and murdering in concentration camps. That's against the Ten Commandments, too.

Notice how they don't care.