State officials misreading history in push to place the Ten Commandments in South Dakota public schools
Senate Bill 51, introduced in the 2025 session of the South Dakota Legislature, proposes to require the “display and curricular inclusion” of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms.
Supporting that, South Dakota Attorney General Marty Jackley, wrote that “the Ten Commandments were influential in the creation of our country and the development of our legal system.” State Sen. John Carley, R-Piedmont, regards the Ten Commandments as “a traditional, historical foundation document.”
It is curious, then, why the Ten Commandments are not mentioned in the records of the 1787 Constitution Convention that established the Constitution of the United States, nor are they mentioned in the Federalist Papers.
If they were so foundational to structuring government in the United States, one might expect a reference to them in these records.
Jackley and Carley are perpetuating a fraud in our own time that mirrors a similar one promoted after the nation’s founding. It was one against which the third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, railed. In a Jan. 24, 1814, letter to the second president, John Adams, Jefferson referred specifically to the provenance of the Ten Commandments and declarations that they “make a part of the law of the land.”
Jefferson noted, “Our judges, too, have lent a ready hand to further these frauds, and have been willing to lay the yoke of their own opinions on the necks of others; to extend the coercions of municipal law to the dogmas of their religion.”
Jackley and others, including our former governor, distort the history of our nation in justifications of their own worldviews. Their reasoning lacks rigor and a comprehensive knowledge of history, features absent in their public pronouncements which they replace with an imagined scholarly gravitas attending their offices.
As Jefferson indicated, they perpetrate a fraud: the imposition of their own opinions upon the citizens of an entire state. To the extent that their opinions are ill-informed, the fraud is even greater.
To be sure, prohibitions against murder and theft, part of the Ten Commandments, are incorporated into law, but many others (especially the first four), are not part of our legal system. The first four, as any simple reading will show, are strictly religious commands.
To promote or teach them in our public schools is to instruct students in religion, violating the First Amendment’s Free Exercise and Free Speech clauses and challenging the Supreme Court declaration in West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette that “no official … can prescribe what shall be orthodox in… religion…”
The citizens of South Dakota are at liberty to accept the Legislature’s action or reject it. To accept it is to become subservient to a fraud; to reject it is the resounding reaffirmation of the founding principles of our nation.
Henry Travers is a retired pathologist who taught medical students in the East and Midwest. Travers retired from the Navy with the rank of captain and served in Bahrain during Desert Storm. He has been an officer in multiple medical associations both nationally and internationally. In addition to scientific works, Travers has published papers on medical history. He makes his home in Sioux Falls.
Photo: public domain, wikimedia commons
