James Talarico

But in all of Jesus' teachings, he's always focused on the outsider, the outcast, the person who's left out or the person who's different.

And so as a Christian, I think my concern is for the Muslim kid and the Jewish kid, the Hindu kid, the atheist kid who's sitting in a classroom who now has a poster on the wall forced by the government that says, you know, your religion is inferior or you're not welcome here.

And I just think if Jesus saw that, he would weep for those students and would demand that we love them as ourselves.

And so that's why I kind of spoke out against the bill on theological grounds, not just constitutional grounds.

So what is the bill?

Can you explain?

Yeah.

So the bill forces every teacher in the state to display the Ten Commandments in their classrooms.

It's only public schools because that's really where we have authority as the state legislature.

And the bill, this is going to sound weird, but it even specifies how big the poster is, the dimensions of it.

It has to be in a conspicuous place.

It's basically the size of a sheet of paper, regular sheet of paper.

The idea is they didn't want anyone to make it too small to where someone wouldn't read it.

But the bill says that the school doesn't have to spend money on it.

It can be donated.

And that sounds fine to most people until you realize there's this huge network of Christian nationalist organizations that are already preparing to flood every school with these Ten Commandments posters for all of their classrooms.

So the donation thing sounds like it's kind of innocuous until you realize that the donations are already ready to go from all these outside groups.

So there's going to be legal challenges, of course, but if it's not struck down in the courts –

every teacher is gonna have to put up the 10 commandments in their classroom against their wills, even if they don't want to.

I mean, I just, again, speaking as a Christian, if we have to force people to put up a poster,