Here’s a clip from the Michael Knowles podcast at the Daily Wire. It’s actually a couple of weeks old, and Knowles is talking about that press conference Gov. Jeff Landry and Attorney General Liz Murrill held to discuss the state’s efforts to defend the Ten Commandments law against a lawsuit the ACLU filed immediately after Landry signed the bill.

Understand, please, that the passage of this law is not a small thing as some people might call it. As I wrote when the bill passed, there’s a whole lot going on here which is actually really important and this isn’t just some feel-good culture war pandering to the Religious Right…

The Ten Commandments were ubiquitous within (and without) the confines of American education for hundreds of years, from before the nation’s founding to practically five minutes ago. It was a Supreme Court decision in 1980 which invalidated a Kentucky Ten Commandments law as an “establishment” of religion.

That was Stone v. Graham, and in that case the Court’s majority used something called the Lemon test, which was a formulation it had laid down in a prior case, Lemon v. Kurtzman. The Lemon test has three parts…

1. Secular Purpose: The government action or law must have a legitimate secular purpose. In other words, the purpose must be unrelated to the advancement or inhibition of religion.
2. Primary Effect: The government action or law must not have the primary effect of advancing or inhibiting religion. The court must consider whether the action or law has a neutral or secular effect.
3. Excessive Entanglement: The government action or law must not result in an excessive entanglement between government and religion. This includes situations where the government is too closely involved with religious institutions or activities.

In Stone v. Graham, the Court found the Kentucky law lacked a legitimate secular purpose.

William Brennan wrote that opinion for the Supreme Court’s majority. William Brennan was about as far-left a jurist as you could find in the 20th century, and he’s responsible for a huge swath of the idiotic precedents the Court set in the 1960’s and 1970’s.

The current majority of the Supreme Court has very, very little resemblance to, and not quite much more respect for, the ideological positions espoused by Brennan.

A case from two years ago, Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, involved a high school football coach in Washington State who took to midfield to pray after games. He got fired for his trouble and sued. According to the Lemon test, having school employees praying would be a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. But the Court ruled that the Lemon test doesn’t apply to an individual’s conduct who might be a school employee.

This Ten Commandments bill might come off as a window-dressing cultural thing. But it’s a bit more than that. Landry and the legislators aren’t simply pandering to the Religious Right here, despite the fact that’s how the bill and its signing have been portrayed in the legacy corporate media.

This is an attack on the Brennan Court. It’s a frontal assault on Stone v. Graham and Brennan’s ludicrous contention that the document which established the basis of our civilization’s moral code has no secular purpose.

The point of passing that bill is to create the very fight the ACLU started when they filed that lawsuit, because it’s a pretty good bet the current Supreme Court will toss Stone v. Graham and probably dumb the Lemon test altogether. If that happens, Louisiana will have changed American law in a very significant way.

The import of which is that states will regain the power to set the relationship between the church and the state rather than have it dictated to them from Washington, DC by leftist judges from coastal-elite backgrounds with an atheist, anti-American mindset.

That’s a big deal, and engaging the fight is important stuff.

So at the press conference, Landry caught a question from a reporter who challenged him with the idea that a poster on the wall of a classroom outlining what the Ten Commandments are and placing them in their context as the foundation of law and morality in Judeo-Christian societies like this one might “offend” someone. And here was his answer, via Knowles’ podcast…

Knowles is exactly right that it’s pointless to even spend taxpayer dollars on public education if something so basic as the Ten Commandments can’t be presented to kids. Who’s offended by any of the Ten Commandments, after all?

But he’s also correct that Landry’s answer was terrific.

It’s essentially Barack Obama’s answer to John McCain: elections have consequences. And not only did Landry win, but so did all those legislators who passed the Ten Commandments bill.

In other words, that bill is the product of a democratic process in which the majority ruled. And while this is not a democracy but rather a constitutional republic, in a republic the majority does carry the day.

Furthermore, no Supreme Court pronouncements are permanent. If that were true we’d still have “separate but equal” segregation of public facilities and other things most people would regard as absurd in 2024.

So the will of the people of Louisiana, as expressed by the state’s governor and elected legislators, is for posters outlining the Ten Commandments to be placed in public school classrooms throughout the state. And Louisiana will fight in court for its authority to regulate the display of those posters in the classrooms it’s paying for.

Landry refuses to apologize for that. And if people who didn’t vote for him don’t like it, they can leave.

He’s not ranting or yelling, he’s merely telling you what time it is.

It’s weird that this is somehow shocking or unusual to hear from a Republican elected official, and I blame that on the 30 years that Bush Republicans controlled the party. That style of politics usually involved groveling at the feet of media and political critics of the things they were doing and constantly compromising on principles they seemed embarrassed of.

Landry isn’t perfect, that’s not the point of this post. But he at least seems to recognize the importance of moving beyond that weak-sauce political style and he recognizes that he’s been given political power for the purpose of using it to benefit the people who put him in that office. Overwhelmingly, we want to reinforce the Judeo-Christian moral values that built our society within the institutions we’re paying for, and this is a fairly unobtrusive way to promote that goal.

More of this, please. It’s not about “owning the libs.” It’s about resetting the parameters of the national discussion such that the Left doesn’t get to be the arbiters of what’s acceptable and what is not. Their track record in that regard is not the best, you know.