A measure that includes the Ten Commandments in a list of “historical documents” was passed in the Ohio Senate on Wednesday. Ohio’s public schools will be required to display at least some of the documents on the list in each classroom of each school, according to Ohio Senate Bill 34.
The bill passed 23-10 Wednesday evening.
Other documents on the list include the U.S. Constitution, the Articles of Confederation, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, the Northwest Ordinance, the Magna Carta, and the mottos for Ohio and the United States.
Democrats in the Senate took issue with the bill, saying it went against the wishes of the founders not only in allowing the display of a religious text in public schools, but also in singling out one religious text over others.
“The founders valued religion and morality, but they didn’t see them as necessitating the display of them … in public institutions,” said Senate Minority Leader Nickie Antonio in a floor speech on Wednesday night.
She also pointed to an ongoing legal battle in Texas where a federal judge on Tuesday ordered some schools to remove Ten Commandments displays from classrooms, after parents claimed a violation of their constitutional rights to religious freedom.
Bill sponsor state Sen. Terry Johnson, R-McDermott, said in an earlier committee hearing on the bill that students would see documents that have “served as the backbone of our legal and moral traditions as a people.”
In Tuesday’s hearing of the Senate Education Committee chair Sen. Andrew Brenner, R-Delaware, doubled down on that argument after the leading Democrat on the committee, Sen. Catherine Ingram, introduced an amendment to remove the Ten Commandments as one of the allowed documents in the bill.
“I personally don’t understand the reason for (removing the document), because many of our founders in fact relied on the Ten Commandments,” Brenner said, adding that there were “other influences there that were brought in using the principles of the Ten Commandments.”
Ingram said the text shouldn’t be included for a host of reasons, most significantly that the document is not a “founding” document, no matter its impact on the state and national founders.
“When you start talking about the founding documents, the Ten Commandments may have been, when you went to church, you went home and you did those things with your own religious beliefs,” Ingram said.
“But that is not considered a founding document, despite the fact that (John) Adams or whomever used that for their own rationale as to what their beliefs were.”
She pointed to testimony against the inclusion of the Ten Commandments that has come in the months since the measure was introduced.
Rabbi Megan Doherty, of the National Council of Jewish Women, testified against the bill in March, saying “treating this sacred scripture as just another item up on the wall in the classroom of a secular school, as S.B. 34 would, demeans and trivializes a text that is holy to many and will inevitably exclude students of minority faiths.”
Dr. Christina Collins, executive director of advocacy group Honesty for Ohio Education, submitted testimony on Tuesday, opposing the bill as well.
She said it “is not responding to any demonstrated problem.”
“While the Ten Commandments hold deep personal significance for many individuals and faith traditions, their placement in public classrooms crosses a constitutional boundary,” Collins wrote.
“Public schools must never be pressured, directly or indirectly, into religious endorsement or indoctrination.”
The bill has the support of D.C.-based evangelical non-profit The Family Research Council, The Christian Business Partnership, and the Ohio Christian Alliance, all of whom previously submitted testimony approving of the bill.
Brenner said the Ten Commandments is just one of the documents on the list, and may not be chosen by any school districts to be one of the documents displayed in classrooms.
Ingram said by including the religious text as if it were a historical document, “here again, we are doing that indoctrination that we cry so much about.”
The attempt to remove the Ten Commandments from the list was tabled along party lines in the committee, as was another effort by Ingram to amend the bill.
The other amendment would have required local school boards to have three public hearings on the selection of the documents, to allow public input before the decision is made, she said.
Brenner said local school boards can decide for themselves if they’d like public input.
“This is going to go to the local school boards anyway, they’re going to be able to determine which ones are going to be on display,” Brenner said. “It’s up to those local school boards how they want to conduct it.”
The bill will now moves on to the Ohio House for consideration.
This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal. View the original article.
