(RNS) — Signing the bill Wednesday (June 19) that mandates display of the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom in Louisiana, Gov. Jeff Landry declared, “If you want to respect the rule of law, you’ve got to start from the original law-giver, which was Moses.” 

That may not be on a par with the probably apocryphal declaration attributed to Texas Governor Ma Ferguson (“If the King’s English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for the children of Texas!”), but it’s no more the case: The ancient Sumerian King Ur-Nammu promulgated the oldest extant law code, more than six centuries before Moses toted those tablets down from Mt. Sinai.

Not that priority in law-giving is the real point of the Louisiana law. The real point is that the giver of the Decalogue was none other than (the Bible says) God Almighty. Or, as the Supreme Court declared in striking down a similar law 44 years ago, “The pre-eminent purpose for posting the Ten Commandments on schoolroom walls is plainly religious in nature.” 

To be sure, Gov. Landry & Co. have enclosed their religious purpose in secular packing material. Alongside the Ten Commandments, classrooms will be obliged to display three major documents from American history — the Mayflower Compact (1620), the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the Northwest Ordinance (1787).

But if Landry truly wished to enlighten the children of Louisiana as to the rule of law in their state, he would also have mandated display of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which was passed by the French National Assembly after the French Revolution in 1789. That’s because Louisiana owes its legal system to the French Revolution.

Uniquely among the states of the Union, that system is based on the Napoleonic Code, which was designed to incorporate thousands of decrees that had been passed under France’s revolutionary government. And let it be noted that Thomas Jefferson had a hand in drafting the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which was presented to the French General Assembly while he was serving as U.S. minister to France, three days before the storming of the Bastille.  

Workers repaint a Ten Commandments billboard off of Interstate 71 on Election Day near Chenoweth, Ohio, Nov. 7, 2023. Louisiana become the first state to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom under a bill signed into law by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry on Wednesday. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)

Three years earlier, the Virginia General Assembly had passed Jefferson’s bill establishing religious freedom, which stipulated that “no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief.”

This notion was reprised in item 10 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man; to wit: “No one shall be disquieted on account of his opinions, including his religious views, provided their manifestation does not disturb the public order established by law.”

It is to be expected that the state-mandated classroom display of the Ten Commandments will disquiet some Louisiana students and/or their parents on account of their religious views. Unless the Supreme Court ends up reaffirming its earlier decision, they’ll just have to deal.