Louisiana Voice

“I don’t care what they write about me as long as they spell my name right.”

That quote, or variations of it, have been attributed to such notables as Mae West, P.T. Barhum and Earl Long. It could just as well apply to Jeff Landry.

Landry knows, or should know, as most personal injury lawsuits say, that his Ten Commandments law isn’t going to fly once it gets into court. It’s in clear conflict with the First Amendment which says Congress “shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”

The issue of displaying the Ten Commandments has already been firmly established by the courts and good as the commandments are in setting out the rules of society, this law is nothing more than grandstanding by a governor who seems to thrive on publicity – any publicity.

Yes, it’s a law sponsored by a legislator, Rep. Dodie Horton (R-Haughton), and passed by the Louisiana Legislature but make no mistake, this was Landry’s bill all the way. Just as he has signed on to efforts to overturn the 2020 election, it is a typical move that a publicity whore would embrace.

There is one other possible motive: as a reader opined, it could be a smokescreen, a diversion, to obscure 16 other laws concerning public education in Louisiana that our esteemed legislature just passed and Landry eagerly signed into law.

Besides the Ten Commandments law and yet another version of “don’t say gay,” some of the more controversial bills pass included that of Sen. Rick Edmonds (R-Baton Rouge) which created taxpayer-supported vouchers, known as “education savings accounts (ESAs) to pay for students to attend private schools and another that prohibits teachers from asking about a student’s vaccination status.

Simply translated, it transfers public tax dollars from public schools to private schools. That’s a dream come true for all those private schools that popped up back in the 1970s as a frantic effort to avoid desegregation of previously lily-white schools. The law was ballyhooed as a wonderful statute to improve education in Louisiana but it failed to address how local school systems will cope with what is certain to produce a financial shortfall.

And never mind that it was vaccinations that eradicated measles, polio and smallpox; our clown car of lawmakers and our idiot governor don’t want required Covid-19 innoculations while ignoring the fact that 1.2 million Americans died from the virus.

In other words, these are just more examples of the legislature’s tendency to pass kneejerk laws to cater to the prevailing political winds with no thought to the negative effects.

Oh, and speaking of legislators doing their jobs and seeing a task through to the finish, whatever happened to that probing legislative committee’s “investigation” of the Ronald Greene death at the hands of Louisiana State Police? Just askin’.