Oklahoma GOP lawmaker refiles bill to put the Ten Commandments in every classroom

Rep. Jim Olsen, whose state ranks 49th in education, thinks schools need more Bible

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If Oklahoma Republicans enact a newly proposed bill, every public school classroom in the state will be forced to display a copy of the Ten Commandments. This is how the GOP plans to improve the education system currently ranked #49 in America…

The bill, HB 1006, was pre-filed earlier this month by Republican State Rep. Jim Olsen in advance of the new legislative session. (He attempted it last year, too, but to no avail.)

Jim Olsen (screenshot via YouTube)

The new bill is a carbon copy of last year’s version except for the dates and says that, beginning in the 2025-2026 school year, “every public school shall display in a conspicuous place in each classroom of the school a durable poster or framed copy of the Ten Commandments.” The font must be “legible to a person with average vision” and the poster must be 16 inches wide by 20 inches tall.

Which version of the Ten Commandments, you ask? Olsen spells it out in his bill (in a way that’s bound to confuse anyone just looking at the number of lines):

The Ten Commandments
I AM the LORD thy God.
Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven images.
Thou shalt not take the Name of the Lord thy God in vain.
Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.
Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.
Thou shalt not kill.
Thou shalt not commit adultery.
Thou shalt not steal.
Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house.
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his cattle, nor anything that is thy neighbor's.

The bill also says that if any classroom doesn’t have a poster or has one that doesn’t meet all the requirements, it must accept a privately donated poster that does.

Nowhere in the bill does it say what the penalty would be for schools that refuse to participate in this Christian charade. Nor does it say the Ten Commandments have to be written in English. Last year, that omission led Florida-based activist Chaz Stevens to mock up posters he planned to send to Oklahoma schools if the bill passed:

An Arabic Ten Commandments poster Stevens made for Texas schools

A “legible” Ten Commandments poster Stevens planned to send to Oklahoma

Needless to say, this is a blatant attempt to inject Christianity into public schools. To quote a federal judge who once declared a Ten Commandments monument outside a Pennsylvania public school to be illegal, “There is no context plausibly suggesting that this plainly religious message has any broader, secular meaning.” From the line “I AM the LORD thy God,” this is an endorsement of a very specific brand of Christianity, and the government has no business telling students what religious rules they need to follow.

It’s not like the list has a purpose. What exactly is the educational benefit of telling children they can’t have other gods before the One True Christian God™? Or that they can’t make false idols? Or they can’t take God’s name in vain? Or that they have to rest on Sunday? Or that they can’t have sex with people they’re not married to? Or they can’t want what their neighbors have?

Do kindergartners really need to be told not to commit adultery? (If that line were in a library book, you know these same Christians would try to get it banned.)

And which teachers are clamoring for the government to give them this distraction?Which teachers are lobbying the legislature for the ability to tell children they’ll burn in Hell for all of eternity if they don’t follow a set of mostly arbitrary rules?

This isn’t just a horrible idea; it’s illegal.

When thousands of Oklahoma teachers went on strike in 2018, they weren’t asking for more Jesus in the classroom. In fact, an NPR report from 2023 pointed out what they were actually dealing with:

Oklahoma's record-breaking teacher shortages have gotten worse: Emergency teacher certifications have more than doubled since the walkout. And the state almost quadrupled its use of adjunct teachers in the 2021-'22 school year – those are teachers who aren't held to any state requirements when it comes to teaching certifications and college degrees.

Teachers saw some pay increases and increased classroom funding over the last five years, but Oklahoma still ranks in the bottom half of all states when it comes to pay, and per-pupil spending is still among the lowest in the country.

But why would any of that matter to Olsen? He’s hardly an anomaly in the Republican Party. On top of that, Oklahoma’s Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters has spent much of the past year doing everything he can to push Christianity in public schools, including purchasing over 500 Trump bibles for select classes. Just last week, Walters’ office released new standards for social studies classes that were heavy on religious indoctrination. In 2023, Walters also formed a faith committee full of conservative Christian pastors that recommended putting the Ten Commandments in every classroom—a move that Olsen is now acting upon.

Olsen may have filed this bill just so he can tell his voters he’s fighting a meaningless Culture War battle even if it’s doomed to fail. But he could just as easily argue that his bill has a better chance of passing now because there’s more support in his party for Christian Nationalist legislation.

One of the reasons last year’s bill went nowhere was because GOP Rep. Mark McBride, the chair of the Appropriations and Budget Education Subcommittee, chose not to put it on the agenda. McBride, however, is no longer in office because of term-limits. The incoming chair for that committee, Rep. Chad Caldwell, has supported Ryan Walters’ attempts at indoctrination. He also refused to sign a letter in August that called for Walters to be impeached.

In an interview with The Oklahoman, Olsen defended his latest attempt to shove the Commandments in classrooms. But notice why he thinks they’re so important:

Olsen added that the U.S.’s 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 which made it into our statutes,” he said. “That’s good for everybody, whatever their personal religious belief might be.”

Apparently, no one ever considered not stealing before Jesus came along.

Honestly, if you need the Bible to tell you not to steal or kill, then you’re the person with moral problems, not the rest of us.

Even if this Ten Commandments bill passes, though, that doesn’t mean it’ll be legal. Republicans successfully passed a law to get the Decalogue in classrooms in Louisiana, but they’ve been thwarted by a federal judge. That case remained tied up in the courts as of this writing.

Separately from that, a stand-alone Ten Commandments monument that was erected on the Oklahoma Capitol grounds was declared unconstitutional in 2015. In 2016, voters (thankfully) rejected an attempt to repeal the part of the State Constitution cited by those justices—the Blaine Amendment—which bans the use of taxpayer money for religious purposes. A bill drafted in response to all that, allowing displays of “historically significant documents” (including the Ten Commandments) to go up in public spaces, also failed.

You would think, then, that stand-alone Ten Commandments posters in public school classrooms would be even more egregious a constitutional violation than those things. But you never know how these things will go.

Jim Olsen, by the way, has spent his career trying to make the lives of citizens worse. He’s previously sponsored bills to punish doctors who provide health care to women, reduce the penalty for people unlawfully carrying weapons, and ban the teaching of the 1619 Project. More recently, he cited the Bible when promoting the use of corporal punishment against children—in an effort to block “the passing of a bill that would ban corporal punishment (spanking, paddling, slapping) for disabled students in schools.” (Because nothing says “I love Jesus” more than hitting children with disabilities.)

Ultimately, the question isn’t whether Olsen has the votes to pass this. He does. The question is whether Republicans in the state want to further alienate public school teachers who have already shown a remarkable ability to organize allies and protest Republican overreach into public schools. The state’s GOP has taken some measures to placate educators, but telling them to push religion into their classes would only undo any goodwill they may have generated with (mild) pay raises.

Olsen’s bill doesn’t have a sponsor in the State Senate yet. If it passes, it would go into effect July 1, 2025, in plenty of time for the following school year.

(Portions of this article were published earlier because Olsen has tried this shit before.)

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