Ten Commandments Coming Back to Public Schools

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

A lively oral argument filled the en banc courtroom of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on Tuesday afternoon in New Orleans, to address this simple question: may states require the posting of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms? Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas have enacted new laws requiring this, which had been banned throughout the United States since 1980.

That was when a 5-4 Supreme Court held, in Stone v. Graham, that state legislatures could not require the posting of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms, even if privately funded. That decision was based on a judicial finding of a religious purpose, which the Court held rendered it in violation of the Establishment Clause.

The Supreme Court has since repudiated the use of a religious purpose test to evaluate state legislation under the Establishment Clause. The entire Lemon test, which was promulgated in 1971 by the Supreme Court in Lemon v. Kurtzman, is no longer good law.

The ACLU argues that a Ten Commandments display in every classroom would have a coercive effect on students. It objects to the use of the King James Version of the Ten Commandments, as found in the Book of Exodus Chapter 20, rather than Jewish or Catholic translations.

Judges peppered the ACLU side with questions about whether it would be unconstitutional to require posting the Declaration of Independence or President Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. President Lincoln quoted verbatim from the King James Version of the Gospel of Matthew, “Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!”

The Court sought historical examples of any impermissible establishment of a religion that was remotely similar to displaying the Ten Commandments in classrooms. The New England Primer, which is called America’s first textbook, sold millions of copies for public elementary school students and included explicit teachings about the Ten Commandments.

A dilemma for the Fifth Circuit as it deliberates in the city called the Big Easy, the birthplace of jazz, is whether to discard Stone v. Graham, which was an unsigned per curiam decision written by liberal Justice William Brennan without oral argument. A majority of the outspoken judges on the Fifth Circuit indicated that they plan not to cast the first stone, an expression from the Bible, but to cast Stone aside and take the chance that the Supreme Court might admonish them for acting so boldly.

A judge opposed to the posting of the Ten Commandments fretted about a child who “believes in a multitude of deities.” In other words, some would grant a heckler’s veto to just one child who might be polytheistic, and allow that view to require taking down the monotheistic Ten Commandments liked by everyone else.

The Pledge of Allegiance is monotheistic, and Texas requires students to recite it in public school without problems. In 1789, George Washington issued his Thanksgiving Proclamation with the words, “Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will,” as an attorney defending the classroom display of the Ten Commandments pointed out.

Yet opponents of the Ten Commandments display requirement complain that this will be in every public school classroom at every level, visible from everywhere in each classroom. This will have a coercive effect, they insist, but a Fifth Circuit judge pointed out that the Stone v. Graham decision said nothing about any coercion caused by a display in a classroom.

Some prayer is allowed at public school football games now, and religious objections to pro-transgender mandates are upheld today. Amish elementary schools that were fined more than $100,000 for not requiring the children to be vaccinated were just given a second chance by the Supreme Court to overturn those penalties in lower courts.

Public school enrollment and attendance have been in a free fall, collapsing at an alarming rate. A post-Covid record was just set in Colorado with a 10,000-student annual decline in enrollment, while Broward County public schools north of Miami in Florida face a potential takeover by the state after disclosure that they are losing nearly $100 million.

Schoolchildren need the benefits of the Ten Commandments in their classrooms now, and should not have to wait for years before the good Louisiana law, which was supposed to take effect at the beginning of 2025, is implemented for their benefit.

Excluding all religious symbols from classrooms has turned them into depressing, valueless places where many kids loathe to be. Chronic absenteeism – missing more than a tenth of the school days – is rampant now and, just as Gen Z is reading the Bible more than their prior generation, posting the Ten Commandments might help boost school attendance too.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.

Trump’s Right to Target Private Equity

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

Inflation in home prices and healthcare is perhaps the biggest reason that swing voters are shifting to the Democrat side in elections. With the midterms less than ten months away, Republicans need to take initiative against a culprit: private equity.

Last week Trump announced his brilliant plan to ban private equity firms from buying single-family homes, which has put their prices out of reach for young adults. Gen Z is the pivotal voting bloc that decides elections now, and if they cannot afford a home then they are more likely to vote against Republicans.

“People live in homes, not corporations,” Trump observed. “For a very long time, buying and owning a home was considered the pinnacle of the American Dream,” but the buying up of these homes by private equity speculators has made homes unaffordable for Gen Z.

Wealthy private equity managers typically enjoy a tax rate lower than what Gen Z pays, which is the opposite of how tax rates should be structured to encourage work by young adults. Private equity managers are allowed to take much of their compensation under the lower capital gains rate, rather than the higher income tax rate that everyone has to pay on their earnings from manual labor or learned professional work.

Depreciation deductions, which are also unavailable to most family homeowners, give private equity a further incentive to invade residential real estate while outbidding Gen Z for homes. Last year private equity obtained additional tax perks from Congress, such as the ability to deduct as an expense from taxes 100% of the value of certain property in the first year of its acquisition, known as bonus depreciation.

While nationwide institutional investors reportedly own only 3% of homes, this is a misleading statistic that includes millions of homes far away from jobs for young workers. In areas highly sought by Gen Z like Atlanta, Charlotte, Dallas, Houston, Jacksonville, and Tampa mega-investors reportedly control up to 27% of single-family home rentals.

Private equity firms are sharks at extracting profits for themselves, and they jack up rental and purchase prices for these homes while Gen Z is unable to compete financially. Often private equity firms swoop in and pay cash to outbid a young couple struggling with debt.

Private equity controls trillions of dollars managed without transparency to the public, while exploiting tax loopholes unavailable to most Americans. Private equity managers do things like buy a hospital to strip it of its assets, and then sell the underlying property off to build luxury apartments, as happened in Philadelphia.

Trump’s announcement caused the stock value of Blackstone, a trillion-dollar asset management company, to drop by an astounding 9.3%, then regaining some of its losses before losing 6% on the day. This demonstrates the significance of how private equity firms have been profiting, while driving up the prices of single-family homes, to the detriment of Gen Z.

The unaffordability of homes for young adults is more than an economic crisis that is deciding elections in favor of Democrats like the New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who won 75% of the Gen Z vote. Home unaffordability also causes Gen Z to delay or not have children, which worsens the crisis of our already-declining birth rate.

Teddy Roosevelt rejuvenated a declining Republican Party at the turn of the last century when he took on powerful monopolies perceived as exploiting the public. TR, whom Trump has praised for doing “great things,” became a champion of the common man much as Trump has been.

In his first term, Trump spoke against the tax advantages enjoyed by private equity, and sought to close those loopholes. At the time private equity had its own senators, including Mitt Romney and Pat Toomey from that sector, but they are gone now after voting to convict Trump on the second impeachment which the American public rejected by re-electing him.

Private equity has been driving up the cost of healthcare, too, as it buys up practices and then cuts services, raises prices, and tries to monopolize specialties. From 2013 to 2022, 82 private equity firms acquired 423 oncology practices, which are necessary to treat cancer.

One study found that practices acquired by private equity firms charged 5.3% more for office visits than the practices that continued under physician ownership. There was a shocking 50% increase in spending on radiation therapy after private equity invaded this field.

The number of physician practices owned by private equity has increased from 816 in 2012 to more than 6,000 today, while private equity owns nearly 488 hospitals. One study in November 2022 by the MIT Sloan School of Management discovered that the negotiated prices between hospitals and insurance companies jumped 32% higher after private equity purchased the hospitals.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.

“999 to 1 Against” Data Centers

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

As Republicans scramble for a grassroots issue for the New Year, to grow the Party as needed to be competitive in elections, opposing data centers could be the Christmas gift that keeps on giving. Local residents were “999 to 1 against” a data center planned for the town of Matthews, located in the suburbs of Charlotte, North Carolina, according to its Mayor John Higdon.

Allowing the development of a data center was on the agenda of a council meeting there in October, when it was withdrawn from consideration. If it had been approved, “every person that voted for it would no longer be in office,” Mayor Higdon observed. “That’s for sure.”

This is the reaction across the country to the efforts by Big Tech companies, including Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook, to build massive data centers in the heartland of America. These projects gobble up land, electricity, and water, while creating very few jobs for the locals who have to endure the perpetual 65-decibel hum of the servers and louder backup diesel generators.

Lobbied state government officials tend to welcome these data centers, as Gov. Greg Abbott in Texas has. But often these projects are shrouded in secrecy and sprung on local residents without explaining the full risks and costs.

Texas has a dire water shortage, while data centers require enormous amounts of water to keep their computers from overheating. One data center can consume millions of gallons of water daily, the equivalent of the needs of an entire town of 50,000 people.

Prior to the invasion by data centers, a Texas agency estimated that many Texas towns and communities would face a severe water shortage by 2030. A harsh drought could accelerate that problem.

There are 411 existing data centers in Texas, second only to Virginia, and another 442 are planned for Texas, which is equivalent to nearly doubling its population in terms of water usage. Texans tap into broad but depleting underground aquifers for most of their water needs, such that data centers anywhere in Texas deplete the water supply for everyone there.

Meanwhile, since 2022 residential electricity prices nationwide have risen by 10%, while electricity prices for data centers and other commercial uses have increased by only 3%, according to a new report published by Yale Climate Connections. Data centers get favorable energy rates while homeowners are forced to make up the difference amid inflation.

If the Democrats who control California want to allow Google and Facebook to build data centers in unpopulated regions of the Golden State, then they can do that. But instead liberal Big Tech is lobbying Republican officials in other states, like Texas, to impose the costs and burdens of these monstrosities on unsuspecting local residents there.

The grassroots are rising up against this, and rightly so. A $2 billion new data center that blights the landscape, dries up the water supply, and overloads the power grid brings an estimated total of only 37 new jobs.

An outcry last year by the public in St. Charles, Missouri, blocked a data center project there by an undisclosed Big Tech company. When residents learned that 125 diesel generators would be used, any one of which could leak to contaminate the local water supply, they successfully defeated the development.

Supporters of data centers criticize the opposition by calling them NIMBYs, which is short for “Not in my back yard.” The same name-calling is used against residents who oppose resettling Somali or Afghan refugees in their communities.

But as with the refugee issue, valid objections are raised as to why people from halfway around the world are resettled far from their own homes in the backyards of those who never invited them. The homes of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon are in the States of California and Washington, so why aren’t most of the new data centers being built in those States?

Another analogy can be drawn to offshore wind turbines, which are typically opposed by local residents and yet pushed by lobbyists and corporate interests. California environmentalists are the biggest promoters of wind as an energy source, and yet Californians have not allowed a single offshore wind turbine along their own vast coastline.

Data centers externalize their many costs to burden the targeted communities, while developers line the pockets of lobbyists to push for these projects without transparency to the public. Often local residents receive little advance notice of rezoning demands.

In northeast Oklahoma, for example, Google is attempting to build one of these data centers in the town of Sand Springs, which the public is only recently learning about. Its planning commission has scheduled a vote on Tuesday, January 27, at the Charles Page High School Cafeteria on whether to approve this, giving people little time to mobilize in opposition.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.