Louisiana’s Ten Commandments law has many problems. It’s an example of state-sponsored religion, it violates the students’ rights of conscience and it requires the government to wade into a theological controversy by elevating one version of the Commandments over others.
It also turns out that the law is premised in part on fake history.
Section 4 of H.B. 71 reads, “Recognizing the historical role of the Ten Commandments accords with our nation’s history and faithfully reflects the understanding of the founders of our nation with respect to the necessity of civic morality to a functional self-government. History records that James Madison, the fourth President of the United States of America, stated that ‘(w)e have staked the whole future of our new nation . . . upon the capacity of each of ourselves to govern ourselves according to the moral principles of the Ten Commandments.’”
There’s one glaring problem with that: Madison never said it. This fake quote has been circulating for years. I first encountered it back in the 1990s when I was debunking the work of David Barton, a notorious peddler of the Christian Nation myth. Barton cited the quote in the late 1980s and early ’90s, but even he admitted in 1996 that there’s no evidence it’s genuine and labeled it “false.”
Scholars at the University of Virginia, where many of Madison’s papers are kept, searched diligently but found no evidence that Madison ever said or wrote anything like it. That’s not surprising: The quote simply doesn’t jibe with Madison’s well-known advocacy of separation of church and state. It’s unclear who created this phony quote or when, but it doesn’t reflect the thinking of Madison. (If you want to know what Madison really believed about church-state separation, check out these verified quotes.)
We expect defenders of the Ten Commandments law to argue that it is supported by “history and tradition.” But the lawsuit AU and its allies filed against the law yesterday on behalf of clergy and parents notes that there’s no tradition of displaying the Ten Commandments in public schools. And, as we can see from the fake Madison quote in the law itself, the “history” cited isn’t history at all.
There are many reasons the law should fail. Its promotion of bad history ought to be enough on its own.
