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In the fifth grade, I did not murder anyone. I also did not commit adultery or covet my neighbor’s wife or his ox or his ass—all because Mrs. Schmeets had the Ten Commandments posted above the pencil sharpener in her classroom. I cannot even count the number of times that framed poster of Old Testament rules kept me from using a freshly sharpened pencil to make unto myself a graven image.
Mrs. Schmeets also distracted me from sin with extra assignments from junior-high math books, and if she hadn’t helped me break my dangerous untied-shoes habit, I probably wouldn’t have lived to see the sixth grade. Mrs. Schmeets used habit trackers long before they became all the rage, and every student in her class overcame a bad habit. Once we had all checked off enough days in a row of keeping our shoes tied or our fingers out of our noses, we were rewarded with a class pizza party.
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Being a bit of a goody-two-shoes and habitual teacher-pleaser, I noted Mrs. Schmeets’s concern that the United States could be in danger of losing the Cold War due to all that soft white bread we were eating while the Russians ate tough whole-wheat bread full of fiber.¹ Not on my watch! White bread was the first thing I sacrificed for my country. The godless Soviets would never roll over this shoe-tying, fiber-toughened American.
Come to think of it, Mrs. Schmeets was a bit of a groomer. She turned me away from shoelace freedom and white bread. Very sinister. Republicans in today’s North Dakota State Legislature wouldn’t put up with that kind of Marxism. They want students to get just the basics: math and reading.
And the Ten Commandments, but not by teacher’s choice.
They have a bill that, in its current form, would mandate posting of the Ten Commandments in every public-school classroom. The bill even has the specific wording for each commandment so nobody will post anything other than the bill’s official white-bread version. Legislators replaced the neighbor’s “ox” and “ass” in the tenth commandment with “cattle”—many of them have a troubled relationship with “ass”—while retaining “thou shalt not,” which nicely echoes a favorite phrase of theirs: “political subdivisions shall not.” It is a phrase they stick into legislation after long campaigns and impassioned speeches about local control.
The funny thing about arguments for the Ten Commandments bill is that they try to frame it as history and common sense and definitely not a state-mandated posting of religious text, but many of the same legislators who sponsored the bill have also sponsored a concurring resolution urging North Dakota to “acknowledge the Kingship of Jesus Christ.” These people need to get on Mrs. Schmeets’s habit tracker; mistaking self-righteousness for moral rectitude is worse than nose-picking.²
This legislation is mostly for show, of course. It has all the depth and dignity of Donald Trump’s Bible-waving PR stunt in front of St. John’s Church Parrish House in Washington, DC. Not surprising considering that these legislators base the rightness of their personal and public behavior on the What-Would-Donald-Trump-Do? model. It’s the same model that Immigration and Customs Enforcement used in deciding to re-timestamp old press releases to create the illusion of mass immigration arrests. It’s all marketing. It’s all propaganda. It’s as real as Elon Musk’s boy-genius mythology.
There are one or two of those legislators, I suppose—the dimmer ones—who subscribe to the idea that removing choice and making something mandatory will cause people to love it more, and that fifth graders will stop committing all that adultery once the Ten Commandments are posted in their schools. They believe in cramming their religion down other people’s throats until the unconverted find Jesus in an ecstatic moment of Stockholm syndrome or erotic asphyxiation . It’s the conversion-therapy approach, of which the same people are big fans.
In Bismarck, Republican legislators are very busy. The eighty-day session is just so darn short. It is almost impossible to wedge unconstitutional pseudo-Christian legislation into such a tight schedule, but it is very important if you are ever going to realize your dream of every student wearing a Ten Commandments sandwich board to Creationism class.³
In Washington, DC, our Republican senators and representatives are equally busy letting President Musk usurp their authority. That whole checks-and-balances thing could get them primaried, and then they would miss some really swank parties. Also, they do not want to miss important stuff like Donald Trump signing an executive order sticking it to trans people while surrounded by Matt Gaetz’s Snapchat friends.
Speaking of Gaetz, he must really be feeling like a premature evacuator. Questions of whether he would be confirmed were just a bunch of Republican posturing. Both of my senators and probably John Fetterman would have voted to confirm him. With Mitch McConnell finally trying to atone for a career of bearing false witness, it might have come down to JD Vance, a guy who doesn’t think a little white supremacy in a young man’s social media history should prevent him from rooting around in government computer systems. Surely, then, sending a little cash to his best and oldest girlfriend via Venmo could not be disqualifying for an Attorney General nominee. That behavior isn’t even listed in the Ten Commandments.
I was also her paperboy, and I can assure you that Mrs. Schmeets’s cat was not on a strict commie-busting diet.
I should mention that Mrs. Schmeets was also once my Sunday School teacher at Oak Valley Lutheran Church.
In North Dakota, the sandwich boards would be supplied exclusively by a Republican legislator’s company, which would have received a start-up grant created in that legislator’s committee.
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