Speaker A: Welcome to another episode of the Cross Examiner Rocket Docket, where you are the judge here. We brief you on the news of the day so that you can issue a ruling. Get ready to hear the arguments because court is now in session.

Speaker B: Welcome, welcome. Welcome to the cross examiner rocket docket. This is a series of short, unscripted alerts. Basically, talking about current events. I just became aware of a current event that is a ten alarm fire. When it comes to constitutional law, when it comes to separation, of church and state, it turns out that I didn’t think this would happen, but it did. The Senate in Louisiana. Louisiana State Senate has passed a bill that mandates that every public school classroom must post a large copy of the ten commandments in their room. This is happening, folks. Passed the House. The Senate has passed it with amendments. Those amendments are, you can characterize them as a band aid attempt to patch over the obvious flaws in this bill.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: So the version that was passed in the house was just, every school shall not may, shall post this. here are the commandments that we list. There’s eleven of them, not ten. Louisiana has some issues here, of course. they can never quite get anything to go smoothly, but there’s a good reason that they can’t in this particular instance. We’ll get to that. So you must post these ten commandments in at least this big in every classroom, and you can’t spend any money on this. That’s one of those band aid attempts to try to make it legal. Because one of the problems with the, establishment clause is the government’s not allowed to tax and spend to support somebody’s particular religion. So if they’re not spending any money on the posters, they’re thinking is, well, then, that’s one way to get out of one problem that we might have with the first amendment. So that was the bill in the House. The Senate just amended it and passed it, and they added all this band aid language, basically saying, hey, whereas I’ve talked. I’ve talked before in my previous episodes, what whereas do. Whereas does give you an instruction. It gives a judge who’s trying to interpret a statute instruction later to say, okay, this is the context that they all agreed upon. Whereas in the past, the supreme Court has mentioned the ten Commandments, whereas they have mentioned that the ten Commandments were important to our history, et cetera, et cetera. a bunch of useless information, quite frankly. Then they say, you shall have a context statement. I forget what the language is that they said for the context statement, but it’s a statement that says, this is a historical document. The reason that we’re posting this is because it was important, it was essential to America’s legal jurisprudential history that the Ten Commandments existed. Without them, we would not have the legal system or the laws that we have today. That’s gonna be their argument. There’s so many things wrong with that.

Speaker C: Right?

Louisiana legislature considering putting Ten Commandments in public schools

Speaker B: But let’s. Let’s talk about why this is a ten alarm fire. It sounds ridiculously unconstitutional on its face, right? You are taking a particular religion, possibly the most famous scripture from that religion, and posting it in government buildings for children to read.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: Your kindergarten kid, when they learn how to read, one of the first things they’re gonna learn how to read, if this bill actually becomes law in Louisiana, is that they shouldn’t covet their neighbor’s wife. Is that what you want your kids reading? Is that appropriate? Are they talking in other areas about banning books because they don’t like sexual content? What, what are they going to do when kids read, thou shalt not covet your neighbor’s wife? How are they going to explain that one? Is that something that you want your kindergartner learning from a religious Louisiana public school teacher, or do you want to, even if you’re religious?

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: I’m not, This is not an atheist issue. This is a. This is a first amendment issue. This is a secular nation issue.

Speaker C: Right?

Speaker B: You don’t want your kids learning their particular prescribed version of the Ten Commandments because they had to pick a version. There’s. There’s a bunch of them, right? Not just between, like, do I use the King James Bible language or the NiV language, but the Catholics may have a different ten commandments than the Protestants. Who wins? There’s. That’s why they have eleven commandments in their list of ten commandments, because they couldn’t settle that infighting. That should tell us something about the claims of religious people, right? They think this is the unerring word of God, the most important message that anyone in their entire life is going to hear. If you don’t obey God, if you don’t bend the knee, you are going to spend eternity to hell. And, if you do bend the knee and you do accept Jesus as your savior, you’re going to eternal bliss. That what could be more important than realizing there’s a whole nother, practically infinite life after this one? And yet, when it comes down to the most important set of rules, they can’t even agree what they are between themselves, right? It’s exactly what you would expect to see if there weren’t anybody at the wheel, if there weren’t some celestial, dictator forcing us to behave certain ways. Okay, so that’s the context of where we are now. So the. The Senate passed these amendments because there’s amendments. It has to go to a reconciliation committee, where the House and the Senate. Well, let’s. There’s two options. It can go to a reconciliation committee, where both of them sit down at the table, the House and the Senate, and they iron out the differences, and then they both approve a new third version of the bill. Or the House can just approve what the Senate did, which I’m guessing is probably what the House is going to do. So if that happens, it goes to the governor. Assuming the governor signs it, it becomes law. And from that moment. From the moment it says in the bill that this becomes law, every single wall, in a, In public schools in Louisiana, will have the Ten Commandments on it. It will not have anything from islam. It will not have anything from Hinduism. It will not have anything from Buddhism. It won’t have anything from the Jains or any of your other scientology or m. Mormonism.

Speaker C: Right?

Speaker B: It won’t have anything saying, there’s probably no God, so stop worrying about it. From, a atheist.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: It’s just Christianity, and it’s just the. The most important law, laws that people cite that they constantly want to shove down our throats. So why is this a ten alarm fire? It’s a ten alarm fire because in the past, this would have been laughed off the table like it probably wouldn’t even passed, because we have a 200 year history of something called the First Amendment and First Amendment jurisprudence. We’ve had a supreme court that’s been giving regular opinions about where the line is, where government is not allowed to establish a religion.

Speaker C: Right?

Speaker B: That’s what we’re talking about here. The establishment clause of the first amendment. The government shall not establish a religion. Well, telling every child these christian rules are the most important thing that we want on your wall is establishing a religion. There’s no doubt about it. However, we now have a supreme court that’s been stacked by a bloodthirsty christian cult that is called the GOP. They’re a fundamentalist christian cult, is what they are. At this point, I don’t actually believe that a lot of the legislators are fundamentalist christian cults, heads. I think they know that a lot of their voters are. So they’re going to do whatever they can to look like they are standing up for their religion. They have this persecution complex. They like to say, oh, we. We poor christians are constantly persecuted, and, it won’t be long until we’re all thrown in jail. Jail, which couldn’t be further. A, couldn’t be further from the truth, right. They’re still the biggest religion in the country, and it’s extremely hard to get elected if you don’t say that you are a Chris, good Christian, lawmaker.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: But b, doing what they’re doing now is how religious people end up in jail by creating official state religions. Sooner or later, you give that gavel, you give that hammer to somebody else, and they may change and say, well, we already have an opinion from the court that posting religious scripture on the walls of our public schools is just fine. I move we change it to this other religious scripture. Maybe it’s just catholic, maybe it’s just protestant. Maybe it’s islamic, maybe it’s Scientology. Who knows? And then a little time later, all of a sudden, well, that’s. I think we should put that on the money. We should change the money up. We should make it more explicit. Sooner or later, we’re going to require a test of religious, belief to hold office, which is also unconstitutional. Sooner or later, somebody is going to be empowered. That makes the final step to say, okay, you have to go to this church. Saying bad things about this church is criminal and will lock you up for it. That’s how it happens. It happens by opening the door. And that’s what the GOP is doing here. They want to complain about being repressed, yet they are the ones that want to do it. That’s what this is.

If Louisiana’s religious school bill passes, every First Amendment group will sue

They have this innermost desire is to hit people over the head with their bible as hard as they can until we all tell them that, yes, we all agree with you, you can stop worrying, and you don’t have to worry that you’re crazy anymore. Yes, you are a good christian person, and we all agree with you. That’s their ideal world. It’s almost like their depiction of heaven, where we just mindlessly worship this God for all of eternity without having to think about anything.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: It’s insane. So they’ve been working on this for decades. It culminated with Mitch McConnell not seeding, not even allowing Barack Obama to nominate a Supreme Court justice that would be heard in the Senate. That’s Mitch McConnell’s doing. We will. We will hold off for a year and not let Barack Obama’s nominee be heard so that we can get a Republican into the White House and then that Republican will appoint three Supreme Court justices. And what is the first thing they did? They took away a woman’s right to choose. They basically allowed states to start doing what we’ve seen doing, which is outlawing abortion, another religious based platform. All of science, all of the facts we know as humans go against the rules that they are putting into place, because we know, at a minimum, for the health of the mother, the health of the child, for all sorts of reasons. Medically, this is a medical procedure, but also morally, we are a sophisticated moral species. Now, we understand that even if there’s a gray area, there are lines where we can say beyond this, it is a woman’s right to decide what happens.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: That’s the first thing this court did. And now the states are drooling and rushing to get all of these cases introduced so that they can have this court say, yep, it’s okay to have this on the wall. And if they do that, it’ll take 20 to 40 years before we have a chance of having a court that would dare reverse it. And Louisiana isn’t the first. Look at what Texas did. They introduced three bills. They introduced a bill about ten commandments in the classroom, like this one. They introduced a bill to hire pastors and chaplains to work in public schools without any educational background whatsoever. And they mandated prayer in public schools. They mandated moments of prayers. All three of those bills were introduced in Texas this year. Elsewhere around the country, we are seeing, charter schools being proposed as religious schools. That government money that normally goes to public education is going to be shifted to pay for religious schools, not to support them in their athletics, not to help with handicapped students that need to go to religious schools.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: Things that are on the edge. We’re just talking about full fledged charter religious schools being paid for by public tax money.

Speaker C: Right?

Speaker B: That’s what’s happening. This Louisiana thing is just another example of them rushing to squeeze this all in while they have an open window with this court. So while it’s not the first, it is the most serious, because the ten commandment bill in Texas actually didn’t pass. They pulled it off for, administrative reasons, but it will probably come back soon. So Louisiana rushed to fill the void here. So, what’s going to happen next is every single legal organization in the United States that fights for the First Amendment is going to join together and immediately file suit against Louisiana as soon as this bill gets signed. I’m talking about the freedom from Religion foundation and others, possibly the ACLU, etcetera. I am working on signing up in, attorneys, constitutional attorneys, to come on my show. I think I’m going to have at least two of them to talk about this bill, soon. So, I don’t want to go on and on and on. I wanted to bring this to you to let you know this is real, this is happening, and it is a real threat, because if it passes in Louisiana, it’s going to get. There’s going to be a lawsuit, it’s going to get appealed, and it’s going to go to the Supreme Court. And there’s a non zero chance that this particular court, which is made up of religious zealots. You’ve heard recently how much we’re learning about how corrupt these justices are. Clarence Thomas with bribe after bribe after bribe, and refusing to recuse himself. Samuel Alito flying flags above his house, supporting the January 6 insurrectionists. Multiple flags, multiple occasions. And now we have these legislators, reading all of those dog whistles, understanding, oh, a corrupt religious cult is in charge of our laws. Let’s get all of these exceptions into the Supreme Court as fast as possible. So that’s what’s happening now. Call your legislator. Even if you’re not in Louisiana, they need to be speaking out about this. This is not a small thing. It may be a small chance that it, That the Supreme Court says it’s okay. But this court did away with what was called the lemon test, the test we’ve used for decades and decades to measure how egregious any particular proposed law is, as far as infringing upon the first amendment, violating the anti the establishment clause or the free exercise clause. And where’s the balance between that? Lemon test is dead. The last opinion we had was the, The. You may remember the coach that always had a public school coach that had his football team pray on the field at a public school event. This court said, that’s now okay. Were not going to. They didn’t use the lemon test. And I think it was sotomayor, in a. In a footnote, in her dissent, said, hey, maybe, even not a footnote, but in her dissent said, they don’t use the lemon test here. Lemon is dead. That, let’s be clear. This is what the court is doing. They’d never liked lemon, and they did away with it. So that means all the doors wide open. Come on in, boys. It’s time to feast. Because we no longer have any, any law, any jurisprudence, any tests that the Supreme Court has enumerated that tells us how to predict what they’re going to do. So call your representatives, write letters, tell them they need to speak out about this, because this is a real threat to the very essence of our secular country. we’ll get into more on this later. I just wanted to let you know this was going on. It’s called Louisiana House Bill 71. I will put up a link to it, on my website, and then I’ll do a full story on it when I can get, some people to interview who are know a lot more about constitutional law than I do. But for now, thank you for tuning into this quick rocket docket episode. There’s going to be a lot more coming. I’ve got tons to talk about.

I am tentatively scheduled to host the atheist experience on June 2

A couple of quick announcements. I am tentatively scheduled to host the atheist experience on June 2. I am now a regular host on that show, and I really appreciate them giving me that opportunity. So I will be on at least once a month is my game, goal, if not more than once a month. and then I still have episodes coming. I’m going to be publishing my part three of my homeopathy episodes. It’s in the can. I just have to edit it. So that’ll be coming out shortly. I guess this is a spoiler. If you watched part two, I didn’t end up overdosing. So. Spoiler alert. And then finally, we will get back into some more first, amendment law in analyzing the old, Kitsmiller versus Dover case, which is a case about why, whether, I should say, schools can teach intelligent design as a way to smuggle in young earth christian creationist theory into our science classes. The answer is no, they can’t do that. But the history of that case says volumes about what’s going on with this court, so tune in for that as well, for now. Thank you for, listening, and I’ll talk to you soon. Bye bye.

Speaker A: This has been the cross examiner podcast, the Internet’s courtroom in the case of rationality versus religion. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider subscribing. See you soon.