What's the Point of Telling Middle Schoolers Not To Commit Adultery?

So a U.S. Appeals Court has ruled that the Texas state government can join those in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Alabama in requiring public K–12 schools to display the Ten Commandments in all its classrooms. Attorney General Ken Paxton, a vocal supporter of the policy, called the decision a “major victory for Texas and our moral values” and averred that “the Ten Commandments have had a profound impact on our nation, and it’s important that students learn from them every single day.”

Alas, the policy comes too late for the 63-year-old Paxton, who is supported by President Donald Trump in his bid to be the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate and caught headlines last July when his wife of 38 years, state Sen. Angela Paxton, announced that she was filing “for divorce on biblical grounds.” By which she meant her husband’s alleged adultery, among the activities forbidden by the Ten Commandments.

Paxton, who is polling ahead of incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in the GOP runoff election slated for May, is no stranger to scandal, including other possible violations of the Ten Commandments, such as coveting thy neighbor’s $1,000 Montblanc pen. In 2014, The Dallas Morning News reported that Paxton, then a state senator, was seen on surveillance footage pocketing the item, which belonged to a lawyer, at a courthouse metal-detector checkpoint. After reviewing the footage, a sheriff “asked a deputy to call Paxton and see whether he had it. He looked. He did. A day or so later, Paxton gave the pricey rollerball pen to a deputy to return to [the lawyer],” said the paper.

But would the Ten Commandments, which are listed in the Old Testament’s Book of Exodus, really work to improve morality among Lone Star State students? They instruct believers to “honor your father and mother,” and not to kill, steal, commit adultery, bear false witness, or covet other people’s stuff, all of which is good advice, but none of which is particularly epidemic among young people in Texas or anywhere else (with the possible exception of The New York Times‘ podcasting studio).

What about the rest of the commandments, which include dictates to have no other gods than the Old Testament’s Yahweh, not to take God’s name in vain, or to make “a graven image” (in the wording of the legislation S.B. 10)? These will surely fall on deaf ears in Texas, where about a quarter of the population either has no religious affiliation or rolls with non-Abrahamic faiths such as Hinduism and Buddhism. It’s worth noting as well that meaningful differences exist among the Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant versions of the Ten Commandments, especially over definitions of what constitutes creating a graven image or false idol and worship of same. Keeping the Sabbath (whether observed on Saturdays or Sundays) holy seems like a tough sell in the state that so loved the world that it gave us Buc-ee’s, the rapidly expanding chain of Texas-sized gas stations cum convenience stores that prides itself on being “open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.”

But these sorts of theological quibbles, or even discussions of practical effects, are clearly besides the point. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that merely posting the Ten Commandments in a “conspicuous place” in all classrooms is not enough to make them “engines of coercive indoctrination.”

Fair enough, but that means they are little more than virtue signaling in a state that U.S. News & World Report ranks a mediocre 29th out of 50 states in pre-K–12 education.

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