Speaker A

A man in an interrogation room says, I’m not saying a word without my lawyer present. You are the lawyer, says the policeman. Exactly, replies the lawyer. So where’s my presentation? •

Speaker B

Welcome to the Cross examiner podcast. The Internet’s courtroom in the case of rationality versus religion. Here, our host uses his experience as both an attorney and an atheist to put religion on trial. We solemnly swear that it is the most informative, educational, and entertaining jury duty you will ever do. And now it’s time for the cross examiner. • • • • • • •

Speaker A

Welcome. Welcome to the Cross examiner podcast. I am your host, the Cross examiner. I am an atheist. I am an attorney, and I am alarmed. I’m alarmed by the rise of Christian nationalism in the United States and more importantly, the mountains of misinformation that’s powering that rise. I started this podcast to, uh, bring my expertise as an attorney and an atheist to help push back on that misinformation. But I also hope to entertain and educate as well. In this episode, we’re going to be focusing on Texas. Texas has introduced a bunch of bills that are going to try to restrict people’s freedom from religion, and we’re going to be talking about that. I have to note first, though, that one of the reasons I’ve been delayed in putting out episodes is I’ve been preparing for an appearance on The Nonprofits. It’s a show you may be familiar with. It is produced by the atheist community of Austin, the ACA. I’ve been a fan of the ACA for at least a dozen years, if not longer, and we recorded an episode together last night. I had a blast. I really appreciate the opportunity to volunteer there and help out. You can find out more about the ACA and all of their shows@atheistcommunity.org. Last night, we talked about some of these Texas bills, but, uh, if you’re familiar with The Nonprofits, you know, it’s a conversational, high level discussion. I like to do deep dives. I like to • • dig into the details so that when you get into those conversations with Aunt Bertha at the Thanksgiving table and she’s spouting off about religious freedom in Texas, you can actually have the history in your back. Pocket and you can pull out the facts and you can pull out the arguments to demonstrate why everything that Texas is trying to do is unconstitutional. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today. We’re going to talk about these three bills. What are they? All right. The first one is a bill that mandates that schools be able to hire chaplains to provide chaplain services. These are public schools hiring chaplains, not mental health workers, as they’re going to try to tell you they are. But chaplains people with a religious affiliation. And we know which religion it’s going to be. Right? They don’t specify in the bill, but we know it’s going to be Christian pastors, christian chaplains present in every school. The bill does provide that they can also accept volunteers. If there’s chaplains that want to go and try to indoctrinate kids for free, they can let those chaplains in. So that’s the first one. Hiring chaplains in every public school. Two mandating a quote, period of prayer and reading of the Bible or other religious text in public schools. This bill mandates that there must be a period provided where students who opt in and staff who opt in may gather and read from the Bible, pray together, and read, quote other religious texts. I’m not sure how often that’s going to happen, as I guess you are probably skeptical of that as well. This period, the bill states, may not replace instructional time. So I guess it’s just going to be it can be before school, during recess, during lunch. Maybe it’s going to replace some sort of time. Massively unconstitutional. Right? Well, we will see. And then the third bill is a bill that requires every single school to post a conspicuous copy of the Ten Commandments in every single classroom. Conspicuous has to be a certain size. It has to be of a font that, • • by the wording of the bill, person with average eyesight sitting anywhere in the classroom may see it. And just to confirm, this is happening in the United States of America, hiring pastoral staff to indoctrinate kids. Mandating, that a period of prayer be made available and mandating, that Scripture, the Ten Commandments be posted in every classroom where everybody can’t avoid seeing it. Those are the bills happening in Texas. Hi. This is editing. Cross examiner here. I have a clarification to make. So after I recorded this, but before I published it, I heard that the Ten Commandments bill actually did not make it through the Senate. What happened was it didn’t fail to pass. It wasn’t voted down. The legislature apparently let that bill, along with dozens of others, expire because of a technicality. They didn’t get to vote on them before midnight of a certain day. So what that means is they’ll introduce it again later. So you may see headlines that this bill is dead or it failed or didn’t pass. That’s not what happened. What happened was a technical deadline passed, and because no action was taken on it, it doesn’t get to move forward now, but later on, someone is sure to introduce this bill again. So the analysis here stands. Thanks for listening to my clarification. • • Why right, why now? Why, after 200 years, are we doing things we’ve never done in this country before? Well, the GOP will tell you in Texas that it’s to put God back in schools. We took God out of schools. We took prayer out of schools. Right? That’s the traditional line that we need to put prayer back in schools so that everything can be made right again. This old, what I like to call the good old days fallacy, everybody always hearkens back to the good old days, back when things were right. And then you try to pin down and ask them when exactly were the good old days? And usually, • • • • • • • uh, eight out of ten, nine out of ten times, they point to a time where they were children. • • You listen to Sean Hannity or Bill O’Reilly or those sorts of folks, and they’re going to hearken back to the when they were growing up. But if you look around and see what was happening during the was anything but the good old times. In fact, the are when we supposedly took prayer out of schools. But what we did is we stopped the religious nut jobs in the country from inserting prayer into schools. So what happened was, back in the 1950s, we were going through something you may have heard of called the Red Scare. People like Joe McCarthy and a whole bunch of conservatives have got the country all worked up that post World War II. This new superpower is coming about the Soviet Union, and they’re all about communism. And if we know one thing about conservatives is they hate Communism, right? They hate anything that has to do with them possibly not making an outrageous amount of money. So they rallied the country and they lied to the country about what was going on. And, uh, as you’ve seen, that’s sort of one of the themes of this podcast. Start back with episode one where I talk about the McDonald’s hot coffee case. People in power and people with money will lie to you. They will mislead you, and they will create a situation where the entire country will do things to harm themselves if it means they get more power or they get more money. And that’s what happened during the Red Scare. They convinced the country to do things like insert under God into the Pledge of Allegiance. That phrase was never in the Pledge of Allegiance until the 1950s. People don’t know this. They think, oh, that’s the way the country always was. No, never in there. They put one nation under God on the money. They did a bunch of things. Joe McCarthy would stand in Congress and say, I have a list here hold up a piece of paper. I have a list here of 53 known communists that are in Congress and in Hollywood. And people would say, can we see the list? Nope. Sound familiar? • • This is something we’ve the pattern we’re starting to see. Joseph Smith uh, these gold plates. Can we see the gold plates? Nope. Hey, we grew back these toes of this woman who had amputated toes. Can we see the toes? Nope. I have a list of communist sympathizers. Can we see the list? Nope. And it’s happening today. The same damn thing is happening today. The GOP will argue and argue and argue till their face is blue, that you got to put prayer back in schools to make everything better. And then when you ask them for any evidence that that has ever been the case. They go, uh, no comment. You need to look no further for proof of my theory than what Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick said in Texas when talking about these bills. And he said, and I quote, I believe that you cannot change the culture of the country until you change the culture of mankind. Bringing the Ten Commandments and prayer back into our public schools will enable our students to become better Texans in order to become a better person. You have to pray to God, to the Christian God, and you have to read the Ten Commandments. And apparently, you have to have chaplains wandering the school to keep an eye on things, right? Like Professor Umbrage in Harry Potter, which is where Texas is going. If you want the perfect fascist analogy, that’s what’s going on here. So, to be clear, back in the they tried inserting prayer into schools. They started mandating that prayer be read in schools, that we have prayer periods, that we have prayer over the PA system. And people started suing and went to court, and the Supreme Court said, yeah, you can’t do that. That violates the First Amendment. And immediately the conservative right said, you’re taking prayer out of schools. You’re taking God out of schools. No, we aren’t. No, we didn’t. You can still pray to this day. There’s nothing illegal about praying in school, reading a Bible in school, talking to your friends and other students or teachers about prayer and God. The teachers might have to decline to make it an official class subject, but you can do anything you want as a student on your own. The only thing that the Supreme Court has said is you can’t spend money to promote a religion, and you can’t force people to participate in prayer. That’s it. And apparently that’s taking prayer out of school, because what people have their panties in a twist about isn’t the prayer. It’s being told, you can’t do what you want. That’s what really gets them all pissed off right now. Not every Christian in Texas is for these bills. In opposition to the bill, we had John Litzler, the general counsel and director of public policy at Texas Baptist Christian Life Commission. He and their organization are opposing these bills. They said at a committee hearing that they have concerns about taxpayer money being used to buy religious texts and pay for these chaplains, and that parents, not schools, should be having conversations about religion with their children. What a reasonable take. What a constitutional take. In fact, to quote him, he said, I should have the right to introduce my daughter to the concepts of adultery and coveting one’s spouse. It shouldn’t be one of the first things she learns to read in her kindergarten classroom, which raises a great point. • • • • Let’s ignore the fact that it’s a religious doctrine. These people want to put posters on the wall that discuss adultery and coveting women or spouses in kindergarten classrooms, which is what’s going to happen if this bill passes. So why are they doing this now? It’s pretty simple. There’s two reasons. One, the rise of Christian nationalism, and there’s a whole series of episodes we can do on the causes of that. But the main cause that sort of unleashed this wave really stems from the election of Obama. M, and we’ll get into that, but it’s a racist Christian reaction to the realization • • that they are losing power, that the country is slipping away from them, so they’re fighting to take it back. So that’s one. And the second reason is what I call the McConnell Court. McConnell for the last 20 years, has been playing the long game and playing it well. He used dirty politics and dirty tricks to stack the Supreme Court. He denied Obama the chance to have his nominees for the Court heard and came up with all sorts of excuses like, oh well, it’s too close to a reelection. It’s not fair to the American people. With a year to go to hear Obama’s nominee, we’re just not going to listen, and we’ll wait until the next president comes along and then we’ll let them nominate. And sure enough, it was Trump. And now we got a whole bunch of conservative justice. And that has resulted in what studies have shown to be the most conservative court in 90 years. This was a study done by Professor Epstein from Washington, uh, • • • University in St. Louis and Kevin Quinn, professor Quinn at • • • University of Michigan. 62% of the decisions during the period during the last, uh, term, conservatives prevailed, and more importantly, they often prevailed in dramatic ways. And the reason that is, there’s no center to this court. We have three liberal judges and six conservative judges and no centrist judge left. There’s no center anymore. So now we have a six judge majority on the conservative side with the liberals off in the corner playing the part of the opposition. • • Uh, they’re just going to write their dissents and tell everybody why they’re wrong. And hopefully those dissents will carry weight a few generations from now when we try to undo this damage. So Texas is trying to take advantage of this rise in racist, fascist Christian nationalism and the most conservative court in 90 years. They’ve already gotten rid of abortion protection and they’re going to get rid of religious protection next. That’s what they’re trying to do. Previously, I would have said all three of these bills will easily be found unconstitutional. Now you can’t be sure we don’t know what these judges are going to do. So let’s talk about historically how these cases would be analyzed and then talk about what has changed historically, the Court since 1971. So, for the last 50 years, the Court has used a three pronged test when examining religious cases. It’s called the lemon test. It came from a case called Lemon versus Kurtzman in 1971. And the court in that case came up with these tests, these sniff tests, to tell whether or not any proposed government action would be unconstitutional due to violating the establishment or the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. The first prong, the first test is the statute must have a secular legislative purpose. That is, it has to have a purpose, something the state can enunciate that is secular. So if I’m going to talk about, uh, let’s say the Ten Commandments poster, the argument that has been presented before is this is not about the religious document, the religious aspects of document. This is a history lesson. The Ten Commandments were very important to Western law. So we’re just putting these in the classroom so people understand they’re important. We’ll get to whether or not that’s true later. But that would be a secular purpose. Just like if I bought Bibles for the school because I was teaching a comparative religion class. I want you to read Bibles, I want you to read the Quran, I want you to read text from any other religion, and I buy them all, and I let you read them, and we talk about the differences and we talk about the historical context. But I am not actually preaching that’s a secular purpose. So that’s the first test. The statute must have a secular legislative purpose that’s fairly easy to pass that test. That prong of the test. You can usually come up with a reason that is okay, pastors are going to help people feel better. That one might be a little problem if you’re hiring chaplains instead of healthcare workers or counselors that are secular, one must ask, why, what do they bring to the game that trained mental health professionals don’t? So you might have a problem with that one. Now, what about the prayer period? Not really a secular purpose there. When you say it’s going to be for prayer and reading of the Bible and other religious texts, not really a secular purpose there. So it’s probably going to fail under Lemon on that. Then step two of the Lemon test, or prong two is the principal or primary effect of the statute must neither advance nor inhibit religion. It can’t advance, uh, religion because it would violate the Establishment Clause, and it can’t inhibit religion because it might violate the Free Exercise Clause. And finally, the third test, the statute must not result in a, quote, excessive government entanglement with religion. Well, what does that mean, excessive government entanglement? They included factors to look at. Three of them. Specifically. One, the character and purpose of the institution benefited. So if I’m donating money to a church, that’s pretty big entanglement. If I’m donating money to a soup kitchen, that’s an independent entity that’s run by the church. That’s less • • entanglement. The second factor to look at is the nature of the aid the state provides. There’s money, there’s tax breaks, there’s providing staff there’s, giving them supplies, things like that, and finally, the resulting relationship between government and religious authority. These are all very fuzzy, intentionally so. A lot of times when you read Supreme Court tests that they come up with to detect where the line is, they are fuzzy. In fact, later cases modified the Lemon test to add a final reasonable person test, which is a common legal fiction that people use. What would a reasonable person perceive? The purpose of this law would be was something along the lines of those tests. And it basically is an excuse to, once you get to the fuzzy part, to let judges sort of make their argument and call the game, so to speak. The first three prongs are a little more descriptive, a little more rigorous, but not tremendously. So it’s hard to argue • • • • • that under the purpose prong, that creating a period of prayer in schools serves any other purpose other than a religious one, right? The purpose prong is a pretty good one. So all three of these laws would have failed easily under Lemon. Unfortunately, over the last 50 years, since it came out, conservatives have been attacking the Lemon test. They criticize it, and they say it’s aptly named, it’s a real Lemon, and it’s come under fire under judicial decisions and dissents. And oftentimes, the Court would veer away from Lemon more and more recently. They would not use Lemon due to some exigent circumstances or some special circumstance. But the death knell really came last year. It was in a case called Kennedy versus Bremerton School District. This was in 2022. You m may remember this. This is the case where a public school, uh, coach would conduct prayer on the field after games. And then the Court found that to be AOK. And Gorsuch, who wrote the majority opinion, did not use the Lemon test, but he didn’t say that Lemon was bad law. A lot of times, there’s this concept of lawyers will say that that is now, quote, unquote, bad law, it’s been overturned, or the Court, uh, disagrees with it, even if they haven’t officially overturned it. He didn’t officially say any of that. But Sotomayor, in her dissent, says and tells us all, listen, Lemon is dead. We’re not using this. The court has abandoned it. So we can all safely assume we won’t ever hear Lemon from the Supreme Court again. So that leaves us with a question. What’s going to happen with these Texas statutes? Supreme Court scholars are standing by • • insert Michael Jackson eating popcorn jiff right now. • • • That’s • • what we would be doing if we were Supreme Court scholars just waiting eagerly to see how this fight is going to play out. I’m going to go through each of the statutes and analyze the history and make my argument as to why they are still unconstitutional, even outside the Lemon test. We’re going to start with the chaplains. All right, so, looking through history, there are three cases in which the Supreme Court or, uh, subordinate courts have said that the government employing chaplains is okay. Three very specific cases. First, there are army chaplain. These are chaplains, usually soldiers. They’ve been trained in basic training, and they serve their fellow soldiers wherever they are deployed. The second are prison chaplains, which is exactly what it sounds like. Chaplains hired and employed by the prisons to minister to or serve the prison population. And third are legislative chaplains. So these are legislative bodies. Employ chaplains to open each session with a prayer and possibly counsel the legislators. Those are the three cases where the courts have said this is okay, and they said so for very specific reasons. And in each case, they declined to use lemon. And they argued that there’s very special circumstances with these three cases, which means lemon doesn’t really apply. So here’s how they analyze them. With soldiers and prisoners, the court noted, these are people who have been uprooted from their community, who are now not living in a situation where they can just walk down the street and go to their local church and get ministerial services. You can’t go and talk to your pastor when you’re serving on the front line or when you’re locked up in jail. So the government recognizes, hey, religion is important to a lot of people, and we want to provide them with a pastor, with, uh, chaplain, somebody they can talk to. People need this, uh, type of service. So the courts recognize this sort of unique situation in those two cases, army chaplains and prison chaplains, people who would have no access to religious services without government action, basically. Also with soldiers and legislative chaplains, the courts have noted, we the people have been paying for that since the dawn of our country, the birth of our country, or before. This has been going on the entire time. And if it was such a big deal, it was such a bad thing, then surely the founding Fathers, who objected to a lot of interference, uh, a lot of instances of interference between the government and religion, they would have objected, but they themselves practiced this, so it must be okay. I have never really liked the we’ve always done it argument. You know, we’ve always had slaves, so it must be okay. It’s not a great argument, but this is a slightly different right. This is, hey, the Founding Fathers did this, so it’s okay. It’s not the same as, hey, Texas had this Christian cross on public land, and it’s been there for 70 years, and nobody’s complained, which is sometimes an argument the courts will make. Nobody complained, so it must be okay. That’s different. That’s a BS argument that people use just as an excuse to let religion linger. This is recognizably different. The Founding Fathers were paying for chaplains for the army. They were paying for a chaplain for Congress. So that’s why the courts have said lemon doesn’t really apply here. These are very unique. But no other cases where government has hired pastors, hired chaplains have passed constitutional muster that I’m aware of. I’m open to being corrected. I did a bunch of research for the, uh, show, and I haven’t found any. But we can differentiate these three cases from the Texas bill, right? The Texas bill that wants to hire chaplains for schools. I think you could probably easily differentiate these. And that’s your job as an attorney is you anticipate the cases or the arguments that your opposing counsel is going to bring up. The case law, the decisions, the precedents. And then if you want to say those precedents don’t apply to you, you need to be able to differentiate your set of facts from the sets of facts in the case law opposing counsel is going to cite. If you want to say, here is case law that supports my argument, you need to show how you are the same, how you are analogous, how you are identical. Uh, • • • • but here we can easily differentiate the Texas bill from army chaplains, prison chaplains, and legislative chaplain. And it goes as follows. One, students are not soldiers, prisoners, or legislators. They have not been uprooted from their communities without any religious services available to them. They’ve got tons of religious opportunity uh, • • excuse me. They’ve got tons of opportunity to get chaplain services outside of school. As I said on the nonprofits last night, I don’t need to tell you that you can’t swing a dead cat in Texas without hitting a church. It’s like the United States capital for church per mile. I’m pretty sure that’s actually true. So Texas students are not wanting for church services. There are people there who will preach to them at the drop of a hat. So that argument of these people have been uprooted and without government action, they wouldn’t have access to these services. That doesn’t apply to students at all. And second, children are more impressionable than adults. They are less likely to object to inappropriate instruction than adults. And due to the laws that mandate school attendance, they would be interacting with chaplains. And all of this religious activity without consent, they can’t get out of it. Because let’s be clear, even though you need a permission form to participate in the prayer sessions, and you probably don’t have to meet with a chaplain, maybe the bill doesn’t say, but maybe they’re not going to make you meet with a chaplain without a permission form. That’s not in the bill, by the way. You definitely are going to be walking around school seeing other kids attend prayer session and seeing chaplains walking around, maybe with their pastor collars on, or a Christian cross or a Bible. And you know who the chaplains are. You’re definitely going to be seeing the Ten Commandment posters. So they can’t escape. They’re more impressionable. They’re less likely to object. They’re very different from soldiers prisoners and legislatures. So it’s easy to differentiate this case and say that doesn’t apply. Finally, we have one other major piece of evidence on our side, and that is, historically, before the Constitution even came, uh, about, the Founding Fathers were faced with a almost exact same set of facts, and they objected vociferously. The history is that, uh, in this case, by the way, what I’m about to tell you, this story about this bill, this 1784 bill in Virginia, has been recounted many times by the Supreme Court. I found it the earliest I found it being discussed was in a case called Reynolds v. United States from 1879. So back in 1879, the Supreme Court is going to tell you the story I’m about to tell you as a reason that you can’t hire religious staff in public schools. All right? So here are the facts of the story. In 1784, the Virginia House proposes a bill. A bill is entitled a bill establishing provisions for teachers of the Christian religion. And the bill would have paid for pastors, chaplains, teachers, those sorts of people to teach Christianity in public schools. And the Supreme Court, when they’re telling the story, notes that I love • • this sentence, quote, this brought out a determined opposition. I love the understatement James Madison prepared his famous document you may have heard of it the Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments. In other words, my protest, my objection to taxing people for religious purposes. That document was widely circulated because the House, in their wisdom, said, we’re going to propose this bill, but we’re going to wait a year, and we want everybody to comment on it. It took a while back then, right? You didn’t have Internets and online polls. You had, uh, horses and rudimentary newspapers. James Madison prepares this famous document. Thousands of people sign it, and the Supreme Court, when they’re telling the story, says that it clearly demonstrates this document of Madison’s, his Memorial and Remonstrance demonstrates that. Quote, religion or the duty we owe the Creator is not within the cognizance of civil government. It’s not within the cognizance of it. The Civil government shouldn’t even think about doing anything like that. This is the Supreme Court all the way back in 1879. What many people would say would be an even more religious time that we live in now, saying, yeah, you can’t hire religious instructors for schools, and that that is 1879, when they’re telling the story, the Founding Fathers, james Madison is saying that in 1784, before the Constitution even exists. So this is evidence that the Founding Fathers would directly oppose what Texas is trying to do right now. But that’s not all for this story, because a little known author you may have heard of, mr. T. Jefferson, I think his first name was Thomas, he wrote a counter bill. In fact, he wrote it before the Christian religion teacher bill came out, seven years before, he had created a. Bill entitled a bill establishing religious freedom and introduced that in Virginia. And it sat around. They didn’t take any action on it. You know what happened after Jefferson and Madison and other founding fathers were objecting to Virginia’s idea of hiring religious teachers? They passed Jefferson’s bill that had been sitting around for a few years. But it contained a very, very interesting statement. And I think this statement is going to stick with us as we analyze in this episode and future episodes. Where is the line between government establishment of religion and governments impeding upon the free exercise of religion? And here is what Thomas Jefferson’s bill said. It’s in the preamble of his act. First he defines religious freedom, and then he says, quote, to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on the supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy which at once destroys all religious liberty. Okay, so what does that mean? • • To suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers on the field of opinion, to allow the government to use its powers to start • • interacting with people based on their opinion, their thoughts, to let the government do that, and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles. In other words, to not allow people • to talk about their beliefs. To restrain the profession or propagation of principles, the profession to profess your principles or to propagate your principles, to spread them around. So to restrain that, to disallow people from doing that on the supposition of their ill tendency. So even though you think that these ideas that they’re going to propagate will have an ill tendency, that they will do bad things when the Nazis march in Florida against the drag, uh, • queens, we think that’s a bad idea. And we have this instinct that we don’t want to allow it. But here is Jefferson saying to restrain the profession or propagation of those ideas. What does he say at the end? To do so is a dangerous fallacy which at once destroys all religious liberty. So they were very afraid back then that they would end up in the same boat that people were in years before when they fled England. Back then, they were kind of weird. Like, uh, everybody thinks of them as just, oh, we just want religious freedom, and we want everybody • • to worship like they want. That’s not always true. If you look at what the pilgrims were doing, they wanted the freedom to do what they wanted. So they wanted to get away from England. But then when they came here and made colonies, what did they do? And they talk about this, the court that’s telling this story, the Reynolds court from 1879. Who’s telling the story I’m telling now? They even talk about that. Back then, the colonies were taxing people for religious purposes. They were giving money directly to churches that some of their citizens disagreed with. Perhaps the best example of this is my home state of Maryland. Maryland back 120 years or so, 125 years before Jefferson is writing his bill. In 1649, they passed an act called the Maryland toleration act. In case you didn’t know, Maryland is named after Mary. It is a Catholic colony at this time. And they passed this act because they came to North America to escape the Anglican Church. They were being persecuted. So they turn around and decide, well, we need to be an example of religious liberty. So this is the first act, the first law in North America that we’re aware of that guarantees religious freedom, but it comes with a gigantic asterisk. It allows religious freedom for who? All Trinitarian Christians. So you have to be a trinitarian Christian, not just a Christian. You have to believe in the Trinity. And it also has a little provision that sort of defeats the purpose, which is anybody who denied the divinity of Jesus would be sentenced to death. This is the perfect example of what the court’s talking about that pre Jefferson. We have the colonies pulling shit like this. They are not only taxing and spending and promoting, they are going to execute people who don’t agree with them. Sound familiar? Is this where Texas is going? There are certainly people in the United States today in Texas who advocate for that position. So jumping back to the court’s discussion, here we have a court telling a story about what Jefferson’s saying, and the court ends by quoting Jefferson’s conclusion. Jefferson says, in the preamble to this act, it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order. And the court in Reynolds says, quote, in these two sentences is found the true distinction between what properly belongs to the church and what to the state. So let’s review which two sentences are he talking about? That first one where we’re talking about suffering the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion. Here he’s saying, the civil magistrate, the government cannot intrude on the propagation of opinions. They can’t stop you from professing your beliefs and preaching to people. Right? And then in the second sentence, he says, it’s time enough for the rightful purpose of civil government for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts. So the second sentence is saying it’s okay for the government to regulate actions. Basically, they can’t regulate speech and thought. They can regulate any actions. And that’s what the court held in the Reynolds case in 1879. They referenced this Jefferson bill. They referenced Madison’s objections. They referenced the idea that a, uh, state would even pay to have Christian teachers in public schools. They referenced all of that as a response to the claims by the defendant in Reynolds, who was a polygamist, and said, hey, I want to marry a bunch of women, I’m getting prosecuted. He was, of course, a Mormon. I assume you could guess that I’m getting prosecuted under criminal law that violates the First Amendment because I want to freely exercise my religion. And the Court in Reynolds in 1879 said, you can freely exercise your religion. You know what that means? You can express your opinion and you can preach to people. But as Jefferson said 100 years ago, it’s totally okay for the government to regulate acts. As soon as you do an act, we can regulate that. And I’m sorry if that act is something that you find holy, the state has every right to regulate. This idea has been around since before 1879, since 1784 or earlier. 1784 was when was when the bill came out, and Jefferson wrote his act years before it. Seven years before. So 1770, 717, 76, 77, around the time of the Declaration. So we have to keep that in mind, because this concept where the Reynolds Court says, this is the Supreme Court of the United States says these two sentences are the true distinction between what properly belongs to the Church and what to the state. What properly belongs to the church is free speech and free preaching. And what properly belongs to the state is regulating actions even if they are religious. This story • • about the act ah, the establishing provisions for teachers of the Christian religion in Virginia in 1784 has been cited multiple times by the Supreme Court. It was cited in 1879 in the Polygamy case. It was cited again in Valley Forge v. Americans United in 1982, not very long ago. 40 years ago. Oh, my God, I’m 40 years ago. And they’ve never abandoned them in Valley Forge. In 1982, Rehnquist was on the court. And you know what he said? Rehnquist one of the most conservative, if not well, no, he’s second most. Thomas is probably the most conservative justice of my lifetime, but Rehnquist is a good second. Rehnquist quotes Jefferson the same act I was just reading you, the same act that the Supreme Court has cited again and again. He quotes Jefferson saying the following to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical. So let’s stop there. There’s more, but let’s stop there. Reviewing to compel a man to force a guy to furnish contributions of money, to tax the person for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves. So to teach or preach things that some taxpayer may not believe is sinful and tyrannical obviously shouldn’t do it. This is Jefferson. This is rehnquist quoting Jefferson, right? So taxing people to preach religion is sinful and tyrannical. And then he goes on quoting Jefferson that even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor whose morals, he would make his pattern. So what does that mean? He’s saying, hey, even if you agree with the religion the state is trying to teach, right? Even if you agree that Christianity is the way to go, if you’re going to tax me or you to support that religion, it’s still wrong because it deprives me or you of the ability to say, you know what? I don’t particularly like this particular pastor’s interpretation. I like that particular pastor’s interpretation. We can have a whole series as to why the Word of God needs interpretation and why, if there’s, like, 9000 individual sects of Christianity, haven’t they all gotten together to agree on anything? We can talk about that. But Jefferson is right here, right? Even if I’m a Christian, even if I’m a Catholic, even if I’m a specific type of Catholic, I don’t want the government taxing me to give money to a Christian pastor because I might not agree with them. So this, again, is Rehnquist, one of the most conservative judges of my lifetime, quoting Thomas Jefferson, a hero of conservative movement who is saying, you should never have the government teach or preach religion. And Texas right now is suggesting doing exactly that. They’re going against Jefferson. They’re going against Madison, they’re going against Rehnquist, they’re going against history, • • uh, in the name of this new fascist Christian nationalism. That’s what’s going on. So history shows us the Founding Fathers, show us the jurisprudence of the court, show us that this should be a no brainer. Don’t do it. So what argument is Texas going to make? They’re going to make a couple of arguments. First, they’re going to probably say, hey, this is, uh, nondenominational. We didn’t say it was Christian pastors. It could be Islamic pastors or Buddhist pastors or whatever. Well, that doesn’t fly, uh, for multiple reasons. One, those are still religious pastors. The reason you’re using a chaplain. Chaplain means religious. It doesn’t mean healthcare professional. It doesn’t mean advisor. It means religious. And by the way, in the bill, it specifies that the chaplains do not need any sort of teaching certification that all the other teachers in the school would normally need. It exempts them from any teaching experience whatsoever. If that isn’t damning, I don’t know what is. We want pastors chaplains coming into the school with no teaching training. Where have I heard that before? Didn’t we just have a report out of Illinois within the last 48 hours of me recording this that reported on thousands upon thousands of children in Illinois having been abused, sexually raped by the church? And now we’re saying in Texas, let’s get people with no teaching training who have questionable qualifications. What do you need to be a chaplain? You probably need to register with the Natural Chaplain Institute and pay a fee. I’ll look into it, but they don’t have a teaching certificate. And we want to let them in school with our kids where they might be able to get a kid alone. When we talk about Conservatives worried about people grooming, grooming isn’t happening at drag shows. Grooming is happening in churches, evangelical churches, Catholic churches that’s every, every damn week we see another story of a pastor or a priest raping children. And the Conservatives want you to worry about public drag shows. So they’re going to try to say, oh, it’s nondenominational BS. If, uh, you want any further evidence of this, look at Australia. Australia created a National Chaplain program back in 2011, and everything I’m going to tell you that is going to happen in Texas already happened in Australia. Let’s talk about nondenominational or the bill doesn’t specify a particular religion. 64% of Australia identifies as Christian. What percent of chaplains in the National Chaplain program in all the schools of Australia are Christian? Do you suspect it’s higher than that? Go higher. Yeah, higher. It’s 97%. 97% of the chaplains in Australian schools are Christian, while 60 something percent 64%, I think were the numbers I saw of the students of the population are Christian. That’s what’s going to happen. I mean, 97% is kind of low, I think, for Texas. They can do better than that, I think, and get up to 99. If they get up to 99.5, they’ll surely round that off to a hunt. So Australia. That’s what happened. What else happened in Australia? There were many complaints of chaplains handing out literature that included statements that homosexuality was wrong, that condoms were ineffective at controlling pregnancy, at, ah, preventing pregnancy and preventing STDs. There were many complaints of chaplains proselytizing to the kids and trying to recruit them for religious services. There were many complaints about chaplains being utterly untrained. The American, uh, • • the Australian Psychiatric Institute put out a report showing how utterly incompetent these pastors were at handling mental health issues of the children of Australia. They did damage in those schools. In fact, one professor related a story she heard from a student who came to her after leaving school. She said, I don’t know if it was her or a friend, but she told the story of a girl who had an eating disorder and she went to a chaplain and the chaplain told the student, you’re just hungry for the Lord. So if there’s any doubt about the bullshit that the Texas Lieutenant Governor, the Texas legislature, the Texas churches are saying, just look at Australia to see exactly where this is going. It is state sponsored religious indoctrination of children. It is unconstitutional, and this court should, in a unanimous opinion, get rid of it. I don’t know what they’re going to do. I’m pretty sure Thomas will let it go. I’m not sure about the rest. So I don’t know where to go from here. I’m already all riled up, as you can tell. But take the money you would use to pay chaplains and hire mental health professionals. One of the arguments I saw floating around by a Texas legislator was saying, well, with all these shootings, they’re happening because we don’t have prayer in school, and getting these chaplains in the school will help it’ll eliminate school shootings. Obviously, he didn’t present any evidence. Obviously, it’s just bullshit. And obviously, a chaplain that has no training as opposed to a mental health professional is a bad choice. So take this money and hire mental health professionals. Moving on. Let’s move to the next bill. Hopefully, that one will be an easy one. The court, if they’re deceptive enough, they will give lip service to all the lies that we heard the legislators spinning. But the history speaks against this time and time again. So if this comes up, remember, the Supreme Court for hundreds of years has recalled the story of Jefferson and Madison railing against a bill where Virginia, • • uh, before the Constitution, was thinking about hiring religious teachers for their schools. And it resulted in massive rebellion by the Founding Fathers and a new act guaranteeing religious liberty that the Supreme Court has pointed to multiple times as the way to analyze First Amendment cases. Moving on. The next bill is the period of prayer bill. I’m going to read this so we know exactly what we’re talking about. The text says, a school may, by record vote, which means you have to record the vote. You have to write down the results and who voted for what. I find that a little suspicious. My conspiracy theorist lawyer side says they want to put board members on the record as to who’s voting against prayer. They don’t just say, you must do this. They’re giving permission to, uh, a school to do this. You may, if you choose to do this, but you have to do it by a vote that’s recorded. Not a voice vote, a recorded vote. So by record vote, they may adopt a policy requiring every campus of the district or school to provide students and employees with an opportunity to participate in a period of prayer and reading of the Bible or other religious text on each school day. In accordance with this section, it says, this may be done, quote, only in classrooms or other areas in which a consent form has been submitted for every employee and student. So the school may require that every single day there be a period in which students who have opted in and staff who have opted in may participate in a prayer, in prayer and reading of the Bible, and quote, unquote, um, • • other religious texts. Obviously, the Bible comes first. • • You never see this as, um you may read religious texts such as the Quran and other religious texts. It’s always the Bible. We know what the purpose is here. So this has been tried before. Again, we have a case called McCullum v. Board of Education. From 1948, Supreme Court struck down a public school program releasing students from classes once a week for religious instruction. It was conducted in the regular classrooms with the students being able to opt out. It required those students, the opt out students, to move to a different classroom to have other studies. The court in the McCullum case dismissed the case on the ground that, uh, public schools maintained with tax dollars were being used by religious groups to spread their faith, right? We’re going to have christian teachers who opt in, read the bible to students. Texas doesn’t get away by saying, oh, you have to opt into this. The McCullum case, you could opt out. • • You still had choice, right? So the court said, given all that, and given the school has a compulsory attendance policy, it violates the first amendment because they’re paying money to spread religion. So that alone should be enough to dispose of the Texas period of prayer bill. But I have another theory that I would like to examine that I think is a theory that needs more attention by supreme court attorneys. And it’s this. And let’s clarify. McCullum, the 48 case was disposed of just as a first amendment that you are establishing a religion by paying money to do this. I’m going to argue that it is also a 14th amendment problem. The 14th amendment, the operative part for this particular instance, is the equal protection clause. So before the civil war, the bill of rights, the ones you’re all familiar with, only applied to the federal government. It only applies to national laws. A state could come in and establish a religion if they wanted to. The first amendment didn’t apply. That led to a big disagreement you may have heard of, which is the civil war. And it was fought over the fact that, hey, you guys are enslaving an entire group of people, and we think they should have equal protection just like everybody else. But you guys have chosen not to give them equal protection in your local state laws. So we want the national government to come in and protect these people. And the, uh, states said, no, we really, really like slaves. We make so much goddamn money, we get filthy rich off of slaves, so fuck you. We’re going to keep enslaving humans and treating them like dirt, and we fight the civil war on it, and we win. And a bunch of traitors who fly the confederate flag and are utterly racist lose. And we create and pass the civil war amendments. There’s three of them, and the 14th one says, nobody in any state can be denied equal protection. The civil war amendments make sure that most of the bill of rights apply to the states. Now, so the 14th amendment, equal protection is an argument that needs to be made and could have been made under McCullum. But definitely I would make it under this Texas bill. I would first cite McCullum and say, this has been done before. It violates the establishment clause of the first amendment. But it also violates equal protection. I would use the phrase this is separate but equal 2.0. Separate but equal was the Plessy versus Ferguson. You may remember one of the worst cases decided in Supreme Court history that said that separate but equal, dividing black children and white children up in school and acting like they have equal resources. Plessy versus Ferguson said, yeah, that’s totally fine. And it took a long time until we got to Brown versus Board of Education where the court said, yeah, no, that’s not fine. Separate but equal 2.0 is what we are seeing in Texas, not just with the period of prayer bill. But I would argue you make this argument with every single religious case that comes to the court 14th Amendment, equal protection. And the best way that I can demonstrate that is to read something that I read last night on the nonprofits. I had this idea of how to demonstrate this, and all I’m going to do is I’m going to read the operative paragraph from Brown versus Board of Education. If you have not read this, and I’ve said this in previous episodes, you really should read the whole opinion. Brown is special. Brown is a wonderful case. It’s one of those few cases that you can point to and say, • • • this is perfect. This is a group of people unanimously agreeing to do the right thing and doing it in such an efficient way. So what I thought was, is I would just take the operative paragraph of Brown v. Board and substitute the words that have to do with race and switch them out with words that have to do with religion to demonstrate the same reasoning applies. So what I’m about to read is Brown v. Board, but I’m going to substitute concepts of religion for race. So where they said black children, I would say atheist children, and where they would say race, I might say religious beliefs. Okay, got it. Let’s see if this logic still applies. As I said last night, pay attention, Texas courts. I’m about to do your job for you and write this opinion. This is all you need to get rid of all of these cases, especially • • • • • the period of prayer. So here we go. To separate children from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their religious beliefs generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone. The effects of this separation on their educational opportunities was well stated by a finding in the Kansas case. Segregation of religious and atheist children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the atheist children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law. For the policy of separating the religious from the Irreligious is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the Irreligious group. A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore has a tendency to retard the educational and mental development of irreligious children and to deprive them of some of the benefits that they would receive in a secular school system. See how that works? Go read it. Go read the opinion. Brown V board. It’s a unanimous decision. It’s like two pages long. And the point they’re making here is, it’s not whether or not there is equality on either side of the line. Even children know there’s a reason the line exists. We’re not going to pretend like it’s just equal. The reason the line exists is one is inferior to the other, and that violates the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment. And this equal protection argument may very well be the only path left to us after this McConnell court has done their damage because lemon test is gone. So first amendment cases are going to be squishier now, right? They’re going to be more permissible as far as government inserting itself into religion, and religion inserting itself into government. Lawyers have not used this 14th amendment as much as they should. In fact, there’s a paper called thou shalt use the 14th amendment done by a law professor. And she argues what I’m saying here, this is where I got some of these ideas is this is a valid argument. This equal protection clause may be even more powerful than just a straight first amendment clause argument. All right, finally, we’re going to wrap up with analyzing the ten commandments bill that was introduced in Texas. And I’m going to read you this bill because it’s got a lot of funny points in it. So the title is an act relating to the display of the ten commandments in public schools. And it says section 141. • • • That’s a product of editing. • • • You start subdividing sections when you insert stuff. So let’s call it section one. Display of the ten commandments. A. A public elementary or secondary school shall display in a conspicuous place in each classroom of the school a durable poster or framed copy of the ten commandments that meets the requirements of subsection b. Subsection b. A poster or framed copy of the ten commandments described by subsection a must one include the text of the ten commandments as provided by subsection c in a size and typeface that is legible to a person with average vision from anywhere in the classroom in which the poster or framed copy is displayed? And two, be at least 16 inches wide and 20 inches tall? C. The text of the poster or framed copy of the ten commandments described by subsection a must read as follows quote the ten commandments on line one. Line two. I am the lord thy god with am with I and am and lord in all caps. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven images. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long unto the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. Thou shalt not cover thy neighbor’s house. Thou shalt not cover thy covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his man servant, nor his maid servant, nor his cattle, nor anything that is thy neighbor’s. That’s the end of that. Section d a public elementary or secondary school in which each classroom does not include a poster or framed copy of the Ten Commandments as required by subsection. A must one accept any offer of a privately donated poster or framed copy of the Ten Commandments, provided that the poster or copy, blah, blah, blah, blah, meets all of the requirements previously stated, et cetera, et cetera. So what do we have here? We have a requirement. This is not, uh, a may, this is a shall. And it must it says, a public elementary or secondary school shall display, and the poster must meet these requirements. What I find kind of funny about this, there’s a couple of things. One, the fact that they had to specify which Ten Commandments, and they also went out of the way to say, I am the Lord thy God with Lord in all caps. Am. In all caps. If you go out and Google the Ten Commandments, right? Many, many church websites ignore that sentence, because it’s not really part of it. The second one, the one that says, thou shalt have no other gods before me, that’s usually what people say is the commandment, • • • • • I am the Lord thy God. That’s not a commandment, that’s a declaration. But of course, in Texas, they’re going to include that, because they want the word Lord to be in all caps. So people really understand from the get go what this poster is about. So it’s pretty funny. But it also raised another question. There are multiple copies, multiple versions, I should say, of the Ten Commandments in the Bible. One of the versions has some sort of rule about not boiling • • a kid goat in the milk of its mother. That’s not a very popular version, but the reason that they had to specify in this bill • • • • • • what the text of the Ten Commandments were is because not everybody agrees. This reminds me of back in I forget the year, but Louisiana, a legislative session, uh, • • in Louisiana, they tried to make the Holy Bible the official state book of Louisiana. You’ve heard of this sort of BS thing that legislative bodies waste their time on, which is creating an official this or an official that, • • the official bird of the state, and the official sport of the state, and the official beer, or, uh, whatever it is, right? And it’s just a way to make people. Feel cozy and to waste time. Well, Louisiana tried to make the Bible the official Book of Louisiana. Guess what happened? Predictably, they couldn’t agree on which Bible, right? The Catholics wanted the Catholic version. The Protestants wanted one of many versions. Was it the King James? Was it the NIV? They tried to make it nondenominational and not even say which version. They just tried to make it the Bible. But eventually they just gave up because immediately the infighting started it. Uh, kind of reminds me here of why they’re putting these words in here, because people are going to disagree about this. So that’s funny. The other part is that they have to get down to • • it’s going to be this wide, this tall. It’s got to be legible to person with average eyesight from anywhere in the classroom. And I’m getting down to the enforcement side of this, right? When I imagine the enforcement side of who’s going to complain about this, I’m imagining doing eye tests to find out who has average eyesight and then having to trust them to sit in every inch of the room and see if they can read the Ten Commandments from where they are. That’s how you’d have to enforce this, right? • • • You’d have to do something ridiculous. So while the bill itself, of course, is very funny, the fact that Texas is declining to obey the Constitution while forcing this down people’s throats is anything but funny. So has the Court addressed this before? Of course they have. Just like the other cases, right? We’ve got Stone V Graham, 1980. The Court held that a Kentucky statute that required the Ten Commandments to be posted in school classrooms did what violated the First Amendment. However, they used the Lemon test. And as I said at the intro to the show, this Court has done away with that test. So what’s going to happen? So the biggest argument that I’ve heard is that this is not a religious document, that this is a historical document. The Court concluded in the Graham case, Stone v. Graham, that requiring, quote, the requiring of posting the Ten Commandments in public schoolrooms has no secular legislative purpose. And that’s the first prong. Remember the first prong of the Lemon test? There’s no way this isn’t religious. But while Rehnquist, who was on that court, agreed with the framework, he said, I think it passes the first prong of the Lemon test because he says that the commandments, quote, have a significant impact on the development of secular legal codes in the Western world. That’s the argument I think you’re going to hear from Texas. This is not a religious document. This is historical document. And that’s why we’re showing it to Kindergartners. We want Kindergartners to come in. And one of the first things they learn to read on the wall is about coveting your neighbor’s wife. That’s what we think is a good idea. So • • is it really a legal document? Was rehnquist right that it had a significant impact on the development of secular legal codes in the Western world? I don’t think so. There’s been a lot written about this. The biggest, best document I could find on this was a 200 over 200, 204 page law review article by Professor Robin Bradley Carr, who is a professor of law and philosophy at University of Illinois College of Law. And their paper was entitled Western Legal Prehistory reconstructing the Hidden Origins of Western Law and Civilization. They spend 204 pages going through the artifacts that we have that talk about where did our legal center come from? And it vastly predates the Ten Commandments well well • • • beyond the time that they were written. We don’t even know when the Ten Commandments were written, let’s put it that way. That’s how loosey goosey that is. But certainly it was around, let’s say, about 600 or 700 BCE. And some of the stuff that we find, uh, • at least what Professor Carr is talking about, is • 4000, 5000 BC. The earliest written law that we have is, uh, approximately 2000 BC. And I’d like to compare it with the Ten Commandments to see how it stacks up. Let’s take a look. So this is the code of Ernamu. I’m not sure if I’m pronouncing that correctly. It’s from Mesopotamia. It’s the oldest human written law on record. It was written on tablets in the Sumerian language about 2100 to 2050 BCE. Approximately 500 to 800 years prior to the earliest estimates of the origin of the Ten Commandments. So five to 800 years before the Ten Commandments, and it includes a lot of laws. Here’s a sampling. One if a man commits murder, that man must be killed. Um, two, if a man commits robbery, he will be killed. Three, if a man commits a kidnapping, he is to be imprisoned and pay 15 shekels of silver. Four, if a man deflowers the virgin wife of a young man, they shall kill that male. Five, if a man appears as a witness and was shown to be a, uh, perjurer, he must pay 15 shekels of silver. Do those sound familiar? Thou shalt not kill. Right. If a man commits a murder, that man m must be killed. Thou shalt not kill. If a man commits a robbery, he will be killed. Thou shalt not steal. If a man commits a kidnapping, he’s be imprisoned. Well, we don’t really get that one in the Bible, do we? We do get some don’t kidnap stuff, but we also get it’s okay to. So not only is it okay to go kidnap slaves from the nations around you, you can keep them as your property for life, and you can beat them as long as you don’t kill them immediately. If you beat them and they die after two or three days, it’s okay. You can pass them on to your children, and you can use them as sex slaves. That’s what the Bible says, but here, five to 800 years before the Ten Commandments, they’re just saying don’t kidnap. Now, in other places in their law, this ancient law, it does talk about slavery. So no different than the Bible. It’s exactly the same. Four, if a man deflowers the virgin wife of a young man, they shall kill that male. Did the Ten Commandments say? Don’t rape. They say don’t covet, but they don’t say don’t rape. Five, if a man appears as a witness and was shown to be a perjurer, he must pay 15 shekels. Do not bear fault witness. Most of the Ten Commandments preexist in this document five to 800 years before the earliest estimates of the Ten Commandments. So rehnquist is full of shit. All right, • • everybody that makes that argument that the Ten Commandments are essential and the core and the source of all that we know is good in our society, in our legal systems, they are full of crap. They’re using that argument, as I have said, in every single podcast, as a way to trick and fool people into going along with what they want. There’s a great story called about the Holy Bible. It was written in 1894 by Robert Ingersol, and he puts this very well. This is what he says about this claim. This claim’s been around forever, so here we go. Some Christian lawyers, some eminent and stupid judges, have said and still say that the Ten Commandments are the foundation of all law. Nothing could be more absurd. Long before these commandments were given, there were codes of laws in India and Egypt, laws against murder, perjury, larceny, adultery, and fraud. Such laws are as old as human society. All of the Ten Commandments that are good were old. All that were new are foolish. If Jehovah had been civilized, he would have left out the commandment about keeping the Sabbath, and in its place would have said, thou shalt not enslave thy fellow men. He would have left out the one about graven images, and in its stead would have said, thou shalt not wage wars of extermination, and thou shalt not unsheath the sword except in self defense. If Jehovah had been civilized, how much grander the Ten Commandments would have been. All that man has accomplished for the benefit of man since the close of the Dark Ages has been done in spite of the Old Testament. I couldn’t put it any better. So let’s remember, when Texas inevitably makes this argument, it’s, uh, a load of hooey. And if the court goes along with it, they’re shortchanging the American people in the name of them forcing their own religion on the country. So here’s my predictions. Let’s take a look at the bills. I think hiring chaplains in every school actually has a chance of passing. I think that they’re going to buy in at least some of the justices are going to buy into the claims that this is going to be nondenominational optional counseling rather than religious based indoctrination and instruction. I hope that I’m wrong on that one, but I think that one actually has the greatest chance of passing judicial inspection. The second one, the period of prayer, is also a pretty close call since they have the opt out. But we have direct case law on that one, so hopefully they’ll let precedent stand. And mandating the posting of the Ten Commandments is just right out. If that stands, uh, the other two will pass. It will be game over. As far as us pretending that the court is anything but a position of power where you get to do whatever you want, so keep an eye on these cases, keep talking to your legislators, keep educating your friends, and don’t let them use these bullshit arguments. What’s happening in Texas is state sponsored religious indoctrination of children, and it needs to stop. I’ll see you next time on the cross. Examiner. • • • • • • •

Speaker B

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