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ACCORDING TO LIZ - Texas S.B. 10 mandated that public schools would have to display the Ten Commandments in a “conspicuous” location in every classroom by the first day of September. A federal judge put a temporary kibosh on that a week ago, but it raises an interesting question.
How closely does Texas and its lawmakers hew to those commandments?
Are there better moral frameworks to teach our kids and immigrants, to show the world how much we care?
Certainly, the first six months of Trump’s second administration has been a panoply of what not to do, morally, ethically and economically. But, to those pesky commandments…
Starting with #6 – Texas continues to lead other states on capital punishment; since 1982 Texas has executed more people than the next four states combined. Even with the recent decline due to the of pursuing death penalty cases, racial bias leading to wrongful convictions and other systemic flaws continue to permeate the administration of capital punishment in Texas.
Texas ranks first nationwide in executions but 47th in per capita spending on mental healthcare.
Yet almost a third of those imprisoned in the state have come under the care of its public mental health system, and more than two dozen men diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or other debilitating mental illness have been put to death in Texas. In 2012, Texas executed Marvin Wilson who sucked his thumb even as an adult and had an I.Q. of 61.
In repeatedly calling on the Bible to justify inhumane actions, the Texas government also de facto violates #3, taking the Lord’s name in vain, by granting itself unjustifiable power over its residents’ life and death, whether on death row or by denying medically-necessary abortions.
Commandment #4 specifically grants a day of rest to everyone, not just the wealthy. As in states across the country, people at the bottom of the pay scale with few benefits provided by their employers cannot survive without additional pay sources. Which means almost five percent of Texans must labor on every day off from their primary job.
The commandment against adultery, #7, is violated flagrantly in today’s world. To find any governing body without salacious goings-on would be unusual but, in the state in question, stories reach Texas-size proportions.
The 2021 election cycle had married Republican State Representative Lacey Hull engaging in a full-fledged affair with Republican State Representative Cole Hefner, also married and a father of seven.
In 2023, former Baptist minister and arch-conservative Representative Bryan Slaton resigned the day before the Texas House unanimously voted to expel him for gross sexual misconduct when an internal investigation documented he had given a 19-year-old legislative aide and other young staffers alcohol, had unprotected sex with the aide while she was intoxicated, and then used threats to shut her up.
Last month, Senator Angela Paxton filed for divorce from her husband, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, after 38 years of marriage on biblical grounds – presumably including the affair revealed a few years ago in one of several impeachment articles filed against him by the Texas House.
Thou shall not steal. Everybody can agree with #8. But it's a sad world we live in when someone stealing a loaf of bread for a starving family or Pampers for a newborn can be punished more harshly than elected officials using the power of office to enhance their personal wealth.
Too often part of the allure of governance is access to the public purse strings at least indirectly where legislation can be pursued to open doors for business profiteering and carve out tax benefits. Trump’s Bastard of a Bill is a case in point, Beautiful for the rich and powerful. And has many echoes at state level, removing regulations put in place to protect ordinary people.
Texas lawmakers are pushing more than 100 bills to clamp down on crime, threatening to overcrowd the state’s jails and prisons the populations of which continue to grow but almost completely excluding the white-collar crime and rampant political corruption of their own economic milieu.
The Enron, HealthSouth, Deepwater Horizon and Stanford Financial Group scandals could not have flourished without averted eyes within government, a government which was supposed to champion oversight and protect workers and consumers from corporate negligence.
The #1 commandment on the surface appears to be a religious dictate, and not at all political.
However, its fundamental principle, that there can be only one god, one way, is divisive in that it is a return to the paternalism of the past, to a narrow-mindedness that serves the state poorly in a period of frightening change, when people need to work together to stop things falling apart.
Leading to #5: Honor and obey get smooshed together with power in paternalistic societies. Forcing people to obey being the operative force. Respect and honor must be earned with faith in each other, hopefulness for the future, and true generosity of spirit.
Parents should take their responsibility seriously and shower their children with love. The acts of fathering and birthing should not automatically grant obeisance. Too often this has created generations of mean-spirited and angry children in the image of and perpetuating their destructive parents.
#2, the commandment against idolatry, runs contrary to a more evolved modern perspective.
That there are other paths people can walk without disparaging different ways is a given in our multicultural world, and Texas needs to embrace this to stay on the cutting edge of the future, not hide behind a vengeful Old Testament god, one who is jealous, one who threatens the children unto the third and fourth generations for the iniquity of their fathers and reserves love only to a small clique of the self-anointed “favored.”
Bearing false witness or lying, #9 on the list, seems to be today’s name of the political game from the White House on down, infecting all levels of government and betraying the public trust; allowing anyone who feels aggrieved to act solely in their own interest, eroding communities and communality.
Weighing in at #10 is covetousness. Happiness should never be based on physical possessions once basic needs are met. Human connections, something more ephemeral but more satisfying than riches, are the most satisfying – family and friends, respect and giving back to the community – just as it is the love of gold, not the gold itself, that is the root of all evil.
It is the coveting of what one doesn’t have – be it a neighbor’s house, his wife, his servant, or anything that belongs to someone else – that is so destructive of happiness. America’s vaunted capitalism which thrust it to the forefront of the global economy over seven decades ago is now being shredded by short term selfishness. Texans and all Americans need to learn to be generous again and share our riches with the wider world.
For that matter, perhaps the title of this article should be the more hopeful: “Make America Generous Again.”
