Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry and Attorney General Liz Murrill are eagerly anticipating lawsuits from civil liberties groups over the state's new law requiring public school teachers to post the 10 Commandments in their classrooms. The ACLU and other organizations say they will sue the state of Louisiana over that new law.
While the Supreme Court previously ruled laws such as this one unconstitutional, a local law professor says the current Supreme Court may reverse that precedent.
Whether the law was passed out of a religious motivation: That's what Tulane University law professor Stephen Griffin says was the major criterion applied by the Supreme Court when used the three-pronged Lemon Test to reject a nearly identical Kentucky law in the 1980 case Stone v. Graham . That test was established by the court in another 1971 church-and-state case, Lemon v. Kurtzman , in which the court ruled that states could not give financial aid to struggling parochial schools.
However, Griffin told WWL's Tommy Tucker that the Supreme Court recently abandoned the Lemon Test. That, Griffin says, opens the door for conservative governments like Louisiana's to push the limits of that decision.
"The basis for the 1980 case has been so undermined that some conservatives figure that now is the time to go forward and make a change to the law, a change that in, in effect, has already happened in the background," Griffin said.
Griffin says the state will argue that the law has an historical basis by showing the origins of law. According to Griffin, the modern Supreme Court is inclined to accept that argument because it recently set a precedent of accepting "history and tradition" as a valid reason to uphold or reject laws. That court's conservative majority has used the history-and-tradition test to reject gun bans and to reverse Roe v. Wade and allow states to outlaw abortion.
"They're going to say, 'This has nothing to do with an establishment of religion. This is about the origin of law giving and being law abiding,'" Griffin said. "A history and tradition of posting or respecting the 10 Commandments in public schools anywhere our history can be drawn on to show that this is really not offensive and it's not an endorsement of Christianity."
However, Griffin says if the Supreme Court uses the history-and-tradition test to overturn Stone v. Graham and uphold the new Louisiana law as constitutional, the court would create a major problem for itself when future matters of the separation of church and state come before it.
"This what they used to call the camel's nose in the tent or a slippery slope, where clearly, even if their purpose wasn't to encourage belief in the Christian religion, it might have that effect, and it's unavoidably linked to Christianity," Griffin said. "What will matter to the court is the principled argument: if you allow this, where are you going to stop? Is there a natural stopping point? I think they are really going to be worried about that."
Most Popular
Comments / 0