On June 19, Governor Jeff Landry of Louisiana signed a law requiring classrooms in all public schools in the state to post the Ten Commandments. This law was passed by overwhelming majorities in the state legislature. The law specifies that the displays must be poster-size, in “large, easily readable font.” And a four-paragraph “context statement” must be shown beside it describing how the biblical restrictions “were a prominent part of the American public education for almost three centuries.”

Some people might say, “Well, who could object to the Ten Commandments? Aren’t they just a universal moral code that everyone could agree on?” 

Well, do you agree that anyone who worships a different god than Jesus should be killed? Do you agree that women are the property of a man just like an ox? Do you agree that the only problem with slavery is if you desire another person's slave? And do you agree that the punishment for all these should be death?!

Well, this is what's actually in the Ten Commandments.

Watch Rafael Kadaris break this down.

And read this excerpt from Away With All Gods, Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World by the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian.

Any reasonable person who knew what was being shoved down our throats should object! 

This law means the state is forcing teachers, school administrators and young people to be indoctrinated with this “moral code.” 

But in actual fact, the U.S. Constitution is supposed to enforce a separation of church and state. Meaning that the state cannot endorse the views of any particular religion, or force other people to practice any particular religion. The state cannot force anyone to say that “I believe in this moral code” (as opposed to some other moral code), no more than it should be able to force anyone to say, “I believe in this god” (or that god or no god at all).  

With this new law, the theocratic fascist Gov. Landry is defying this basic principle.

These are reactionary commandments that uphold slavery, patriarchal oppression, and unthinking allegiance to a nonexistent god. 

An Agenda for Rule by Religion

This is part of a whole larger agenda—an agenda to turn the U.S. into a nation in which Christianity sets the rules and legal framework, and the word of religious authorities is law. A theocratic Christian-fascist nation. 

This same agenda was behind the overturning of the constitutional right to abortion. It has been behind the attacks on LGBTQ people. And the Republi-fascists are hellbent on making this kind of stuff the law of the land—forcing religion onto people everywhere—using whatever means, be it violence or stolen elections if they have to.

Over 40 years ago, Kentucky passed a similar law which was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court because it was a clear and blatant violation of the Constitution. The court ruled that the Kentucky law served a plainly religious purpose. 

But the Christian fascists now believe the majority Christian fascist Supreme Court could well reverse this decades-long established ruling, and the fundamental separation of “church and state,” just as they did with Roe v. Wade. In 2022, the Supreme Court sided with a high school football coach who got on his knees and prayed at midfield after their games.

Trump himself was quick out of the box to make clear where he stood and what he would fight for once he had power:

I LOVE THE TEN COMMANDMENTS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS, PRIVATE SCHOOLS, AND MANY OTHER PLACES, FOR THAT MATTER.

Trump wrote: 

READ IT—HOW CAN WE, AS A NATION, GO WRONG??? THIS MAY BE, IN FACT, THE FIRST MAJOR STEP IN THE REVIVAL OF RELIGION, WHICH IS DESPERATELY NEEDED, IN OUR COUNTRY. BRING BACK TTC*!!! MAGA2024 [TTC, meaning the Ten Commandments]

(Yes, the capital letters were in the original.)

What the Democrats Did in Response

And how did the Democrats, those great champions of democracy, respond to this most recent attack? Well, here’s a multiple-choice test—see how well you do:

a) Biden immediately held a press conference denouncing this law and vowing to throw the weight of the Justice Department behind seeking an immediate stay on this law.

b) Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called on people to get in the streets and fight like hell to defend the separation of church and state.

c) They said and did nothing.

If you guessed a or b, you haven’t been paying attention. The Democrats like to pose as the great defenders of democratic “norms,” but they are—and they will be—very selective on which “norms” need to be defended and how. 

The question to dig into is why. And here we turn to Bob Avakian (BA), writing two years ago, in an article entitled “The Supreme Court Moves to End Abortion Rights: ‘Taking to the Streets,’ and Refusing to Let This Go Down.” The excerpt from that article that we run below applies to the battle over the separation of church and state and other critical struggles as well:

BA writes:

An essential reason for the Democrats’ increasing capitulation to the fascists is this: While the fascists are determined to rally their “base” behind their lunatic views and their aggressively oppressive and repressive “agenda,” and they eagerly welcome the ways this challenges and tears up the “established norms,” the Democrats are dedicated to an increasingly failing attempt to maintain those “norms” and to continue trying, even as they fail, to “overcome the divisions and polarization in society.” This is an orientation and an approach that is bound to perpetuate very real horrors, including male supremacist as well as white supremacist oppression, brutality and terror, and to continually give rise to even greater horrors.

The capitulation by the Democrats in the face of the fascist offensive is also sharply revealed by the fact that the Democrats refuse to challenge—directly, consistently, and with any real conviction—the Christian fundamentalist lunacy that is the “moral basis” for the fascists’ fanatical opposition to abortion. (This Christian fundamentalism has a great deal in common with the Islamic fundamentalism of forces like the Taliban in Afghanistan—and one of the main things they share is the fanatical conviction that women must be subordinated to and dominated by men, forcefully if necessary.)

Why won’t the Democrats really challenge this? An important part of the answer is that the Democrats, whether or not they are personally religious (and specifically Christian), base themselves on the conviction that religion, and in particular Christianity, is necessary in order to hold together their system of capitalism-imperialism, which is full of cruelly exploitative and oppressive relations and divisions that could tear the country apart, if religion did not play a major role in “holding it together,” in the face of this terrible exploitation and oppression, and the brutality and murder that enforce it. The Democrats are very aware that, even if they raise mild criticisms of Christian fundamentalism, or strongly insist on the constitutional “separation of church and state,” the Christian fascists will relentlessly attack them for being “anti-Christian” (even though Christian fundamentalism is an extreme, and extremely oppressive, version of Christianity and is not the same as Christianity in general).

The Democrats’ basic capitulation around “the separation of church and state,” was sharply revealed when, in the early 2000s, an atheist parent (Michael Newdow), who is also a lawyer, challenged the phrase “under god” (“one nation, under god”) in the “pledge of allegiance” that school children in particular are often compelled to recite. His case went to the Supreme Court, and even though the Court ruled against him (on the narrow basis that he did not have legal standing to make this challenge), Newdow had a very strong Constitutional basis for his arguments that this phrase (“under god”), as promoted by government institutions, is a clear violation of “the separation of church and state” and discriminates against people who are not religious. Did the Democrats support this challenge by Newdow? No. In fact, large numbers of Democratic politicians, including prominent members of Congress, made a point of gathering not to rally in support of Newdow and the principle of “the separation of church and state,” but instead to publicly and loudly recite the “pledge of allegiance” and particularly emphasize the words “under god.”

With their orientation and approach, the Democrats can never, and will never, resolutely challenge the Christian fundamentalists’ “moral” basis for opposing and seeking to outlaw abortion, nor will the Democrats mobilize the kind of determined, sustained massive opposition to this fascist offensive that is necessary to preserve and extend rights that are vital for the masses of women, and the masses of people as a whole.

With laws like this Ten Commandments lunacy in Louisiana, these dark ages Republi-fascists are seriously moving to shred people's basic rights and the foundational “norms” of this system. This can't be allowed to go down! And as we've explained above, the Democrats will not defend these rights in the way they need to be defended.

What's needed is to get organized to not just defeat the fascists, but to do so as part of getting rid of this whole oppressive system that has given rise to these fascists. What's needed is a revolution for real—and these kinds of sharpening splits make the revolution we need more possible in this time. Get into why that is so HERE.