Some educators are pushing back in class and in court against the display of the religious code in public schools

When history teacher Chris Dier sued Louisiana two years ago for mandating that the Ten Commandments be displayed in classrooms, he said it was not about taking a stand against Christianity.

“It’s a defense of many different types of values, including civil liberties and religious freedoms,” Dier said, who teaches at a New Orleans high school. “I spent over 16 years teaching students that the constitution protects everyone of every faith – students of no faith too.”

  • Corvidae@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    Texas’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, and other proponents of the law have argued that the Ten Commandments are “irrevocably intertwined with America’s legal, moral and historical heritage”. It’s a perspective that Usher said she “unequivocally” rejects.

    “As an African American woman, American heritage has been oppression and slavery,” she said. “I see a push in certain ways that some people in this country want to go back to those things. The last thing I see is people obeying the Ten Commandments.”

    When I was a kid (born and raised in the US), and I was sent to private religious (Christian) schools, I learned that Christianity had a fixation on child abuse and punishment. When I later read the bible, the New Testament was unbelievable to me, Christian institutions had proven to me they practiced the Old Testament, not the New. After I read the bible (I was sixteen), I stopped calling myself a Christian. Never again.