Louisiana GOP lawmaker can't defend her own Ten Commandments law

State Rep. Lauren Ventrella couldn't answer basic questions about the legality of the law she sponsored

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In the days after Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry signed a law forcing a Ten Commandments display in every public school classroom, Republicans have repeatedly failed to defend the bill on secular grounds.

There’s a simple reason for that: They can’t because there is no secular defense of it. That’s why a lawsuit to stop it is already in the works. The Ten Commandments are a religious list with religious items. Non-Christians don’t subscribe to every commandment, and plenty of Christians don’t subscribe to the very specific KJV version of the Ten Commandments that will be plastered on school walls. That includes the roughly 26% of adults in Louisiana who are Catholics.

Everyone knows the real point of the bill was for Christian Nationalists to flex their legislative muscles, not because they have any desire to improve school or make kids’ lives better. They want to be sued, then when they lose, they will appeal the decision all the way to the Supreme Court, in the hopes that the right-wing super-majority will find, somewhere in the deepest sections of their asses, a justification to eradicate the wall of separation between church and state once and for all.

Still, it’s kind of shocking how they’re not even trying. It’s almost embarrassing to watch them speak publicly about it.

Consider State Rep. Dodie Horton, the primary sponsor of the bill. Months ago, she didn’t bother making a “tradition” argument by saying the Ten Commandments were a foundational text in our nation’s history. (It’s not, but that’s the party line.) Instead, she said she just didn’t care about the critics or religious minorities:

"I'm not concerned with an atheist. I'm not concerned with a Muslim," she said when asked about teachers who might not subscribe to the Ten Commandments. "I'm concerned with our children looking and seeing what God's law is."

She didn’t care about non-Christians. She just wanted all kids to know what her God—and only her God—supposedly said. That may work in a pulpit but it had no business coming out of a legislator’s mouth.

Nor did it help when Gov. Landry, while signing the bill, also made a religious reference (while ignoring the child who fainted directly behind him).

… If you want to respect the rule of law, you got to start from the original lawgiver, which was Moses.

It’s laughable for any Republican to talk about respecting the rule of law while their party’s leader is a convicted felon who has personally broken just about all the commandments.

More to the point, Landry suggested you can only respect the law if you respect God. That’s also bullshit. (Just to cite one data point, atheists represent a mere 0.1% of federal prisoners. And when it comes to just about every social metric you can think of, we’re the moral ones.)

Moses wasn’t even the original lawgiver! (Hammurabi, anyone? That’s just one example, too. There were others before him.)

It’s telling that Landry could only speak about religion while signing the bill because he didn’t feel like pretending it was anything other than faith-based legislation.

But the worst example of all this came when the captain of the JV squad went on television to defend the bill.

That woman on the right is State Rep. Lauren Ventrella, the bill’s co-sponsor. On Friday afternoon, she went on CNN to respond to criticisms about it… and fell flat on her face.

The entire interview is laughable for so many different reasons so let’s go through them:

• When asked what the penalty for teachers/schools would be for refusing to follow the law, Ventrella said there was none (which is true)… but added that displaying the Commandments was still required.

• Ventrella said the bill was justified because “whether we like it or not, Moses is in the Supreme Court of the United States. The Ten Commandments are in the Supreme Court of the United States.”
  
  She was referring to a frieze on the Court’s walls that contains ancient lawgivers.

  

  Moses is on there, holding the stone tablets. But Moses is not singled out. He’s one of many lawgivers in the frieze. Ventrella didn’t sign a bill forcing a series of ancient documents on school walls. Her bill only included the KJV Christian one. That’s why the comparison fails.

• When CNN host Boris Sanchez pointed out that the Constitution is secular and doesn’t include “God” or “Jesus” or “Christianity,” Ventrella sidestepped the issue and offered a non sequitur: “I bet you CNN pays you a lot of money.”

• She then claimed the law was justified because “I got a dollar bill in my wallet.

  ‘In God We Trust’ is written on that dollar.” But not only is that phrase generically religious rather than a promotion of one specific brand of one specific faith, it’s also a political slogan that the Christian Nationalists of the 1950s pushed through in response to the “Godless Communists” we were fighting in the Cold War. In other words, she took a political stunt and acted like it was a historical tradition.

• Ventrella then asked, “Why is it so preposterous that we would want our students to have the option to have some good principles instilled in them?” The obvious response is that the Ten Commandments isn’t a list of good principles. It’s a list of religious edicts that include a couple of generic moral teachings. Telling people not to kill? Fine. Telling people to keep the Sabbath Day holy? Pointless.

• Sanchez asked Ventrella what she would say to parents or teachers who didn’t share her religious beliefs. She responded, “Don’t look at it.” Ignore it. Which is a hell of a thing to say when Republicans refuse to do the same when it comes to Pride flags, library books, same-sex marriages, health care, abortion pills, etc. They make their opinions our business. But as soon as they shove their religion in everyone else’s face, the rest of us are told to just look away.

• Then came the most predictable question of all: How would Ventrella react if her child had to see a display of the Five Pillars of Islam in the classroom? Again, there was no real rebuttal. “This is not about the five pillars of Islam,” she whined. Sanchez added it was just a hypothetical. Ventrella then attempted to pivot: “You could give me a thousand hypotheticals. But again, this specific bill applies to this specific text. The Koran or Islam? That is a very broad statement. We're specifically talking about a limited text.”
  
  Obviously, she had no response because the truth was that it would never be acceptable to her if another religion was given the same treatment as Christianity. But she believes her faith is superior to all other faiths, and she’s illegally using her elected position to turn that into law.

• Sanchez pointed out that religious scholars “don't even agree who wrote the Ten Commandments, where or when they were written.” Ventrella couldn’t answer that one. “Look, religious scholars may not agree,” she said, “but I'm going to tell you right now, Louisiana, in both houses, agreed. And we passed this legislation.” (Right. Because Louisiana’s legislature is full of Christian Nationalists. That’s the point. There’s nothing historical about this.)

• Finally, Sanchez asked what a teacher should say to a kindergartner who saw this document on the wall and wanted to know what “adultery” meant. Ventrella’s answer was to treat adultery like youth pastors treat masturbation: by refusing to talk about it. “This is a historical document that's posted on the wall to remind everyone of good morals,” she argued. Somehow, introducing children to sex outside of marriage is perfectly fine when it’s in the context of promoting Christianity.

That interview took place on Thursday afternoon. Ventrella was out of her depth and came across as an ignorant buffoon who didn’t understand the concept of religious pluralism or putting herself in someone else’s shoes. It was humilating.

But ignorant people are usually the most confident.

So on Thursday night, she went back on CNN to speak with host Abby Phillip. It became very apparent that she didn’t spend any of that downtime figuring out responses to basic questions about her own bill.

Incredibly, many of the questions were the same… yet Ventrella was lost at sea.

• Phillip asked if Ventrella would be okay with Jewish or Muslim teachers hanging their own religious beliefs next to the Ten Commandments display in the room. Instead of answering, Ventrella said, “It’s a great night in Louisiana because I know, tomorrow morning, the Ten Commandments are going to be proudly displayed in classrooms.”
  
  … Does she not understand her own law? It doesn’t go into effect until January 1, 2025 (which is when the bill says the signs must be up). And even beyond that, it’s summer. School is not in session. There will be nothing displayed in classrooms “tomorrow morning.”

• Phillip repeated her question… and Ventrella still avoided it. “We could pose a thousand hypotheticals, but the piece of legislation that was brought to the state of Louisiana was specifically regarding the Ten Commandments. You’re giving me a scenario that can’t be specifically addressed without knowing more of the details.”

• As a kicker, Ventrella added that she was “knowledgable and educated” about her bill. Her answers all day reflected none of that.

• Phillip tried again with the same question. This time, Ventrella said she’d look at those hypothetical bills… before segueing into how the Supreme Court is totally fine with what Louisiana is doing. (They have not, in fact, said anything like this is acceptable. Not yet anyway.)

Moments later, in the same interview, Ventrella once again brought up the argument that a one dollar bill includes “In God We Trust” on it. This time, Phillip called her out on it:

PHILLIP: “In God We Trust” was put on the dollar bill in the 50s. The 1950s. Not the 1850s or the 1750s. The 1950s. So it’s not an original, you know, document of the United States government. That's… not a great argument.

VENTRELLA: [Pauses] … Well, it’s still on our dollar bill no matter how you want to look at it. It’s still there every day.

That response reeks of a complete moron who’s used to speaking to Christian audiences who never call her out on her bullshit.

Both interviews were reminiscent of when child sex predator Roy Moore was running for U.S. Senate and his spokesperson, Ted Crockett, insisted that Muslims couldn’t be in Congress “because you have to swear on the Bible.”

When CNN’s Jake Tapper told him that wasn’t true, Crockett was visibly shocked.

That jaw-dropped look of someone whose entire world view collapsed in front of his eyes is what Ventrella would have given if she had any ounce of self-awareness.

I have no clue why conservative Christians think they’re smart enough to do real interviews on topics they know nothing about, but that’s the beauty of faith: It lets you think you’re absolutely right about a subject on which you’re actually clueless.

Incredibly, Ventrella is a lawyer by trade. Yet she’s completely out of her league making sense of the Constitution and everything in the First Amendment.

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