Every teacher who has spent more than a year in the classroom knows that if you tell a class "I don't want to hear one more peep out of you," the next thing you will hear is "peep." And the next thing that will happen after that is you will find yourself wasting time in an argument about whether saying "meep" or "fleep" or "booger" violates the dumb rule that you just pulled out of your butt. Before you formulate a rule, make sure you've thought it through.
If there is one thing that has been consistent about people who want to get religion back into the classroom, it's that they never, ever think things through. And so we have the current time-wasting silliness in Texas.
Senator Bryan Hughes is an East Texas Republican who came up with Texas's anti-abortion bill with the clever workaround of having the public rather than law enforcement enforce it. Hughes cleverly worked that into his bill attempting to get God back in the classroom, which declared that if somebody donated an "In God We Trust" poster to a school, the school must display it in a conspicuous place. It became law, and Hughes, who had definitely not thought things through, expressed his happiness on the Twitter.
The national motto, In God We Trust, asserts our collective trust in a sovereign God. I’m encouraged to see groups like the Northwest [Austin] Republican Women and many individuals coming forward to donate these framed prints to remind future generations of the national motto.
The Christian cell phone company and election financier Patriot Mobile also chipped in some signs, saying "We are honored to be part of bringing God back into our public schools." The Yellow Rose of Texas Republican Women chipped in, and of course Moms for Liberty did, too. But then things took a turn...
Activist and artist Chaz Stevens sent along some posters with "In God We Trust"--written in Arabic. He set up a GoFundMe (you can still contribute) on which he says of the SB-797, "The law seemingly presumes these signs are written in English. Oopsie."
Others donated "In God We Trust" posters with rainbow colors. Some districts rejected the signs, immediately finding themselves in stupid meep arguments. For example, Carroll ISD rejected the not-what-we-wanted-here posters and argued that "the statute does not contemplate requiring the district to display more than one copy at a time." In this case "does not contemplate" means "does not actually say anything one way or another." Ditto for their argument that the law "does not contemplate" any language other than English.
The Carroll ISD donor, Sravan Krishna, replied, "It doesn’t say you have to stop at one, so that is your decision to stop at one. Why is more God not good? And are you saying you don’t have, like, one square feet of space in our buildings?”
The law does say that the poster must include an American flag and a state flag, and no other images or words.
The argument that the school only has to display one poster rests on the use of "a" as in the school must display "a durable poster or framed copy." I'm not saying that Carroll ISD School Board President Cam Bryan is grasping at straws, but his argument includes calling "a" the "singular tense." Oddly enough, none of the run-up to all this donating activity included anyone saying, "Remember, we just need one poster per school."
Meanwhile, because it's Texas, someone else is threatening lawsuits against districts that put up the naughty signs, arguing "the legislature passed this law to set a good example for schoolchildren, so we are taking action to ensure schools do just that, and conspicuously display compliant posters that everyone is sure to love, equally.” So Arabic and pride flaggish posters are out because somebody will hate them?
Even if Texas wins its dumb argument about the singular determiner, that simply opens up another dumb argument about who decides which single poster goes up, and how they decide. Is it first come, first served? Does the spot open up anew every school year? Or will school districts form a committee to select which "In God We Trust" poster is the acceptable one, and what criteria will they use, and will this then put the school in the position of deciding which God is the one allowed to be perched on their walls and does anybody on any side of this dumb argument really want that?
Conservative christianists agitating for "religious freedom" and "putting God back in the schools" always seem to forget that there is more than one faith. You can try to open up schools to access by those faiths, but access will always, by the very nature of schools, be limited, and therefor somebody will have to decide, somehow, which faiths get to have that access. The wall between church and state is meant to protect the church; break it down and you are a few short steps away from a government agency deciding which religion gets to enjoy certain privileges (and which do not). That is not good for anyone.
We could try to have an honest conversation about that, or folks could pass dumb laws instead. Texas has made its choice. Unfortunately for them, the principle holds--make dumb rules, end up in dumb arguments.
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