The 10 Commandments & The Wokes

Texas’s SB10 is a free speech assault that woke people have made us hypocrites in resisting.

Wait, we’re fighting about the 10 Commandments in public buildings again? Is it 1998? This feels like a time travel story. Except in this yarn, our futuristic weapons and sensibilities are counting against us.

Prologue: The Equity Statement

I worked at a school once that was considering language for an equity statement they wanted to put on the website. The place already had broad anti-discrimination rules, but as a private, international school, we’d never been required to display them anywhere public.

The only change from the existing policy to the statement draft we were considering was the addition gender identity as a protected characteristic that could not be discriminated against. The original policy didn’t expressly exclude trans people, it had just been written at a time when its framers didn’t have that vocabulary.

When I saw the proposed changes, I was confused, and a bit concerned. We already had trans students at the school. Had there been some policy change that threatened their status? It was possible there had been. It was a nominally Christian school, and there were already parents and board members reacting angrily to some of the “woke stuff” that was happening in classrooms.

This climate of irritation suggested to me that it was possible a change had occurred, and that our trans students might not be allowed to continue studying with us. I didn’t want that. They’d been at the school for a long time - some of them since way before trans was cool - and I was fond of them.

It turned out there was no threat. Nothing had happened beyond a few administrators deciding they wanted to use the website to signal the school’s virtues, which actually wasn’t a completely shallow thing to do. Once a flow has been established, electing not to go with it is as much of a signal as surrendering to it.

Equity statements were becoming all the rage, and there are effectively two flavors of nominally Christian school out there: liberal (small-L) schools with a Christian background, and hardcore, pulpit-pounding sweat lodges. Boston College vs. Bob Jones.

We were very much in the former camp, and wanted to make sure we weren’t being ignored by applicants trying to avoid the latter. We also didn’t want to attract too many folks of the latter persuasion and have them arrive only to be disappointed. So this statement for the website had a specific, intended purpose.

Still, I expressed reservations. There’d been this blow-up a few years earlier, in which students had wanted to take same-sex dates to prom, but were being resisted. It had been resolved by administrators dusting off the school’s bylaws and confirming that, yes, gay students were protected (as such, there was no basis for prohibiting same-sex prom dates).

I’d been party to this episode, seen the bylaws myself, and knew for a fact that while they protected gay students, they did not protect trans students. I thought it was a risky gambit to announce something that got ahead of actual school policy.

What if one of those grumpy, woke-skeptical board members saw the statement, got annoyed, and decided to launch some holy crusade against our trans students? Was a banal piece of virtue signaling really worth putting real, flesh-and-blood students at risk?

I can’t even remember how this saga ended, beyond it being an anti-climax in which nothing really happened. The point to that whole run-up is that schools will often communicate things for reasons other than their stated reasons.

Shocking, I know, but this is observation is relevant to today’s topic.

Thou Shalt Not

The conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals just ruled in favor of Texas’s SB10, which requires public school classrooms to display the 10 Commandments.

In fact, SB10 goes even further than that. It requires the display to be a certain size, to be displayed in a prominent location, and even requires a specific text/translation of Exodus 20.

We shouldn’t mince words: SB10 is a serious affront to free speech. The court ruled that the bill could proceed because a 10 Commandments poster doesn’t represent a violation of the Establishment Clause, which it maybe doesn’t.

I have a poster in my classroom of Bob Fosse leading a company of dancers with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. I have another of John Stuart Mill. Does that imply that kids in my class are required to become classical liberals, or chain-smoking, revolutionary choreographers?

The issue isn’t that kids are going to see a 10 Commandments poster and think, “Yikes, better make sure I honor the Sabbath this week.” It’s that it requires teachers to project something that may run directly counter to their personal or religious values.

Although…shit.

We’ve just hit our first of several argumentative roadblocks. Each of which was erected for us by woke bandits who spent 10 years forcing the entirety of western civilization to dance to their tune while they laughed and shot pistols at our feet.

They Ruin Everything. Everything.

You have no idea how much I’d like to be up in arms about this 10 Commandments thing. No idea.

As a free speechy shitlib, this is my jam. This is the kind of thing I get out of bed for. I was put on this earth to oppose nonsense like this, and so was almost everyone I admire. I was raised Christian, and have no objection to the 10 Commandments, but public schools being forced - not allowed, mind you, forced - to display the 10 Commandments in classrooms? In America? Fight me.

And let’s consider for just a moment how actually ridiculous SB10 is.

I know, I know. Texas is Christian. Its founders were Christian. Christianity is part of the state’s tradition (it’s a part of all states’ traditions, but never mind). But a lot of things are Christian, and most of those things aren’t required as displays in public school classrooms.

First of all, the 10 Commandments don’t even appear in a uniquely Christian part of the Bible. Why not require a display of Matthew 5; the Beatitudes? Those are definitely Christian, and much better suited to a school. “Blessed are the peacemakers” vs. “Thou shalt not commit adultery?” How many ninth graders are a threat to commit adultery?

Second, the 10 Commandments are not a good representation of the law. They barely even inform it. Only two of the prohibitions - killing and stealing - are illegal in Texas (lying is too, sometimes), and some of them are expressly permitted. Texas is covered by the Establishment Clause. Worshiping other gods before the God of Abraham is absolutely something that public school students are allowed to do.

You wouldn’t put up a poster that said, “Thou shalt not go fishing after dinner on Tuesday.” Because why would you? That’s not a rule that anyone at the school - or anyone anywhere - has to follow. What’s it doing on the wall of a chemistry class?

The problem with pointing this out though, is that the sturdiest free speech arrows in our quiver have all been snapped in two by insipid woke people who abused the guidelines of permissible communication in public schools to bend children to their will. Every single salvo we might launch at SB10 requires us to look over our shoulder because - dammnit, Susan! - somebody in our camp already did that thing, and probably rubbed Texas conservatives’ noses in it.

The Church Of Woke

Was what wokes were doing identical to SB10? No, it wasn’t. We should be fair here.

State-compelled speech in blue states didn’t take the exact approach SB10 does. For example, between sections 220, 234, and 234.1 of the California Education Code, schools are required to draft anti discrimination, bullying, and harassment policies that specify who’s protected and on what grounds. They also have to display those policies where kids can see them.

Since, in California, public school students may not be discriminated against for being transgender, every school has to have a poster up somewhere that validates and protects transgenderism. Might there be teachers in California who are skeptical of gender identity theory? Doesn’t matter. The rules are the rules.

California’s mandate isn’t as exacting as Texas’s 10 Commandments mandate is. It doesn’t require uniform language, and it doesn’t specify that every classroom has to have a rainbow poster. In practice, though, the ideology behind the policies is pervasive. And unlike the 10 Commandments, which Texas students aren’t actually going to be expected to obey, California students better damn well take heed of the rainbow posters.

Anti-discrimination, anti-bullying, and anti-harassment policies are reliably used by leftists to launder their ideology into the classroom. And once embedded, compliance is not optional. The justification used is, “Hey, it’s just the law.” Which it is.

Functionally, California’s guidelines - and New York’s, and Illinois’s, and Oregon’s, and Washington’s, and many more states’ - are like the Miranda warning. The idea is that rights and protections don’t mean much if people don’t know they have them. But to think that these statues don’t represent a mandate for ideological signaling, just as Texas’s does, is naive in the extreme.

Wokeness, leftism, identitarianism, PC, turbo-online gooberism, whatever we want to call this, may not demand the worship of a deity, but it is absolutely a religion. And that church’s acolytes are as zealous as they come.

Complicating The Case Against SB10

Because of this, opposing SB 10 is difficult for liberals to do without tripping over our own hypocrisy. Did I set my hair on fire when California amended their education code, or when New York passed the Dignity for All Students Act? No. I did not.

Which means that religious intrusion into classrooms isn’t my real problem, and neither is compelled speech. I only get off the couch when Christians do it.

Obviously, teachers do not own their classroom walls. A school - and by extension a state board of education - has every right to require or prohibit whatever it wants for those walls. So already, we’re on shaky ground in pushing back against this thing.

And the 5th Circuit is kind of right. A 10 Commandments poster no more requires a student to honor his parents than a reading poster requires a student to read (would that it did…). Unless wed to actual policy - which presumably, the 5th Circuit would have a problem with - a poster is just a suggestion. An advertisement.

Still, while woke educators may have done well avoiding legal landmines, their actions unquestionably violated the spirit of the 1st Amendment. Which makes it very hard now to oppose Texas’s violation without betraying a double standard.

The notion that leftist propaganda doesn’t represent religious dogma falls apart on even minimal inspection. And the notion that leftists are opposed to compelled speech? Come on.

The “State your pronouns” people? The land acknowledgements people? The “Tell us how your research will advance the cause of diversity, equity, and inclusion” people? These people have a problem with other people being made to express things they don’t actually believe?

Girl, please.

Epilogue

On the bright side, SB10 is just red meat. It really won’t have much in the way of practicable impact. It’ll serve as something Christian conservatives in Texas can wave in front of their aging, megachurch-attending voters as proof that they “owned the libs.” It won’t do more than that.

But these fights aren’t important because of their actual impact. They’re the vehicles we use to determine who we are as a country.

Now, those of us who want the First Amendment to our Constitution to be held as sacrosanct - yes, above the 10 Commandments; yes, above the Book of Exodus; yes, above the Bible; yes, above P.S. 128’s rainbow-decked anti-bullying statement - those of us who worship at the Church of the Enlightenment, we’re just kind of fucked.

Very few of us can make a good-faith charge into this fray, because very few of us charged into the last one.