A bill to put the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms has been revived for a year.
State Rep. Jim Olsen, R-Roland, pre-filed the legislation this week and it is an exact copy of previous legislation introduced during the 2024 session. The only change is the effective date of the law and the start of the school year, 2025-2026. A Senate author has not yet signed on, but Sen. David Bullard, R-Durant, signed last year’s bill.
Last year, the bill reached the Appropriations and Budget Education Subcommittee but was left off the agenda and effectively pushed aside by former committee chairman Rep. Mark McBride, who was term-limited. McBride is a staunch critic of mixing religion in public schools.
“Not every kid in that class has the same faith as me,” McBride said last year. “All these people keep talking about the founders. Our founders (wrote) the First Amendment to the Constitution. It effectively prohibits Congress from favoring one religion over another.”
Olsen said the goal is to give young people a more accurate and thorough presentation of the country’s history. He said displaying the Ten Commandments is one way to accurately represent the spiritual heritage of the Founding Fathers, but that most of America’s Christian foundations have faded or been swept away.
“[They are] widely regarded and supported by the founding fathers and most leaders of early America, so I wanted them to have that accurate history. That this is the way they relied on things,” he told The Oklahoman.
Along with the Ten Commandments, Olsen said the Bible should also be in schools because it is a “certain, definitive part of our history as a nation.”
“We have always been a Christian nation with freedom of religion for all,” he said. “Any student is welcome to look at that history and say, ‘Hey, in my opinion, that would have been, instead of a Biblical basis, we would have been better off with something else.’ Of course, everyone is free to make that judgement.”
Olsen added that the US legal structure and cultural background had strong biblical foundations. He gave an example of laws about stealing.
“Well, I can’t do that because ‘thou shalt not steal,’ which comes from the Bible and is written into our bylaws,” he said. “That’s good for everyone, whatever their personal religious beliefs.”
The bill does not require an allocation of taxpayer dollars to pay for the posters, but instead relies on private donations. Olsen said he believed groups would donate copies, and that taxpayer money would not have to be used to provide schools with the copies.
But now that new lawmakers have been sworn in, some of them arguably more conservative than those they replaced, and are heading into a new legislative session that will likely include plenty of conversations about religion in public schools and the separation of church and state, Olsen hopes it bill will have a positive effect. a better chance of passing both chambers to the governor’s desk.
Olsen didn’t know if there would be enough influence to pass the bill this year, but he said he hoped new leadership and freshman lawmakers would be more receptive.
“Last year’s leadership has introduced a lot of good conservative bills over the years, but for whatever reason they weren’t really big on this,” he said.
State Schools Superintendent Ryan Walters has been calling for at least two years for the Ten Commandments and other similar religiously affiliated documents to be displayed or used in public school classrooms, saying it would promote Christianity and “Western heritage.”
The bill again calls for a durable poster or framed copy measuring 16 inches wide and 20 inches high.
A long battle over the Ten Commandments and other documents in the classrooms
Efforts to get this and other documents into public school classrooms have been underway in Oklahoma for at least a decade.
In 2016, Oklahoma voters — by more than 200,000 votes — rejected State Question 790, which would have struck down Section 5, Article 2, of the Oklahoma Constitution, which states: “No public money or property shall ever be appropriated, applied, donated or used directly or indirectly for the use, benefit, or support of any sect, church, denomination, or religious system, or for the use, benefit, or support of any priest, preacher, minister, or other religious teacher or dignitary, or a sectarian institution as such.”
The state question was placed on the ballot by the state legislature in response to a 2015 Oklahoma Supreme Court ruling. The court ordered the removal of a privately funded Ten Commandments monument from the Capitol grounds, marking a ended a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.
That monument now stands on the grounds of the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs — a conservative lobbying group — a few blocks south of the Capitol.
In 2017, House Bill 2177, which would have allowed the Ten Commandments — along with the Magna Carta, Mayflower Compact, Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights, and the U.S. and Oklahoma Constitutions — to be “proudly and resolutely displayed in public buildings and on public buildings’. public lands” did not receive a hearing in the Senate. During the three years it stood on the Capitol grounds, the Ten Commandments monument led to requests from others to build a monument there, including a satanic group, a Hindu leader and People. for the ethical treatment of animals and the satirical Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
According to NPR, Louisiana became the first state to require schools to display the Ten Commandments this year, along with contextual paragraphs. Lawmakers there also argued that the document is important to American history.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1980 in Stone v. Graham that the posting of the Ten Commandments “had no secular legislative purpose” and was “plainly religious in nature,” and that the Commandments were not limited to demonstrably secular matters but concerned things like worship of God and observance of the Sabbath day, according to an analysis by Oyez, a free-rights project of Cornell’s Legal Information Institute, Justia and Chicago-Kent College of Law, which is “a multimedia archive dedicated to making the Supreme Court of the United States accessible to everyone.”
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: The Ten Commandments bill is being reintroduced for a new Oklahoma legislative session
