What Louisiana’s Governor Got Wrong about the Ten Commandments

When Jeff Landry signed the state’s law requiring all classrooms to display the Law of Moses, he let his faith get ahead of a 4-ton fact.

Andrew Jazprose Hill
6 min readJun 23, 2024
Theodore Roberts, The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. Demille, Dir.) Public Domain

Louisiana now has a new law requiring every classroom in the state to post a copy of the Ten Commandments, but when the governor announced it, he made a colossal mistake.

It was the kind of error that might go unnoticed in Gov. Landry’s Louisiana, which is ranked third least-educated in the nation (behind West Virginia and Mississippi).

It was the kind of omission that didn’t even register in the state legislature, which drafted the measure and where Republicans hold a two-thirds supermajority and dominate every statewide public office. Even if any of those lawmakers had noticed, they would not have cared.

Because they have bigger fish to fry

They are trying to make America godly again. And what better way to do that than to take the lead in putting the Law of Moses under the noses of every student in every classroom from kindergarten through college.

It was a bold move in the ongoing battle between good and evil. For once, it was Louisiana serving as the engine…

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Andrew Jazprose Hill

I write about Art, Culture, and Race through the mindful lens of memoir. You can also find me in The Jazprose Diaries and in The Fiction Fix on Substack.