Louisiana AG Expects State’s ‘Ten Commandments’ Law Will Reach Supreme Court
This summer, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill unveiled a series of sample posters that teachers could put up in order to fulfill the state’s new requirement that the Ten Commandments be displayed in all classrooms — calling the posters “plainly constitutional.”
Her office has asked a federal judge to throw out a lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union that argues the law violates “the separation of church and state and is blatantly unconstitutional.” The case will head to trial next week.
Ultimately, though, Murrill expects to be “standing in the United States Supreme Court” to defend the Ten Commandments law, and she already has a plan for what she’ll say, according to a recording provided exclusively to Rolling Stone by liberal documentarian Lauren Windsor. Murrill spoke with undercover reporters for Windsor’s digital investigative outfit, the Undercurrent, at a Moms for Liberty town hall on July 16.
Some of the posters that Murrill released on August 5 seem like they were designed to troll liberals, such as those featuring late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Hamilton playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda. At least one of the Ten Commandments sample posters appears to have been crafted to appeal to justices on the high court.
“I’m working with some private organizations to design the poster, so that the poster is constitutionally compliant,” Murrill says in the recording. “I’d like to incorporate some photos from the east frieze of the United States Supreme Court, so when I’m standing in the United States Supreme Court, I can point out that Moses is right there, in their building, in quite a few places… The case has a long way to go, but I do think some people are going to move similar legislation.”
One poster, which Murrill posted online several weeks later, is labeled “The Supreme Court & the Lawgivers.”
“Various lawgivers, including [William] Blackstone, Moses, and [John] Marshall, look over the Supreme Court as it goes about its daily business,” the poster reads. “They are represented through the west and east wall friezes.”
The poster, of course, includes text of the Ten Commandments.
Speaking to Windsor’s team, Murrill says it was surprising how “incendiary” the Ten Commandments law has been. “I mean the national press went crazy,” she says, adding that after Gov. Jeff Landry (R) signed it, “everybody thought we had taken down the whole First Amendment … It’s a little more complicated than that.”
The ACLU, representing families with children in Louisiana schools, is suing the state over the Ten Commandments law, or H.B 71, saying it violates “the Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.”
“Permanently posting the Ten Commandments in every Louisiana public-school classroom — rendering them unavoidable — unconstitutionally pressures students into religious observance, veneration, and adoption of the state’s favored religious scripture,” the ACLU lawyers write.
They note that in its 1980 decision in Stone v. Graham, the Supreme Court “struck down a statute similar to H.B. 71, holding that posting the Ten Commandments in public-school classrooms violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.” The lawyers add: “Stone remains binding precedent, and H.B. 71 is, therefore, unconstitutional.”
This summer, Landry, who signed the Ten Commandments bill into law, told Rolling Stone flatly: “The Supreme Court got it wrong about the separation of church and state.”
Nonetheless, Murrill insists in the recorded conversation: “Our bill has room, has some flexibility, enough in it, that I think it’s constitutional.”
In a statement her office provided to Rolling Stone, Murrill says: “The law prohibits the use of public funds to pay for printing the posters. We also have been sued and are defending the constitutionality of the law. So my office has been engaged to show both the courts and the public how the law is constitutional. We have done that by putting designs together that illustrate the point. We used them in our brief, we held a press conference to explain how this works, and we have offered them to private organizations who support the law and want to pay for printing. The upshot of what I said then and what I’ve said every time I’m asked is that the law is constitutional.”
Windsor and her team have made a documentary, Gonzo for Democracy, chronicling the growth of Trumpism, election denial, and right-wing religious extremism. The documentary will premiere Tuesday night in Washington, D.C., and will be made available online soon.
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