The outrage du jour is of course the conservative Xtianists making their brains itch by deciding the Paris Olympics have besmirched their own personal religiousy beliefs by pArOdYiNg ThE lAsT sUpPeR KENNETH, but I’m not going to address that. “BUT THEY APOLOGIZED AND EVERYTHING KENNETH” no they didn’t apologize for parodying The Last Supper, because they didn’t parody The Last Supper, and I’m not going to address that. Their concerns are not legitimate.

Instead, let’s jump back a couple of weeks and consider that Oklahoma’s State School Superintendent, one Ryan Walters, issued a mandate that Oklahoma teachers would all be given a Bible and that every teacher “will be teaching from the Bible in the classroom.”

The state’s Attorney General raised an eyebrow and pursed his lips on that one, and more than one school system has politely but firmly told the Superintendent to shove it, but Walters is adamant that Oklahoma’s madrassas will do his bidding.

It is in that spirit that I offer the following lesson plan to Oklahoma’s teachers.

One of the weirdest shibboleths of the Xtianist world is that the Ten Commandments were an integral part of the founding of this nation, and that we are therefore a Xtian nation even though Moses and Mt. Sinai can in no way thought of as “Christian.” To be clear, they push the idea that requiring the Decalogue to be posted in every classroom is not religious in the least because the Commandments are part of the founding documents of the United States of America. They want students to be taught that without the Ten Commandments we wouldn’t have the Constitution.

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So, class, today we are going to look at how the Ten Commandments informed our nation’s governing document. Bobby, can you pass out the Commandments, and Alice, give everyone a copy of the Constitution…

Does everyone have their packet of ten different highlighters? You’ll need a different color for each Commandment, of course. And you all have a black marker, right? Good, let’s get started.

Let’s start with your pink highlighter. Highlight the first commandment: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”

Okay, good. Now work with your partner to look through the Constitution and find where James Madison and those other guys used the first commandment as a source for their ideas, and highlight that passage with the pink highlighter.  I’ll set a timer for five minutes. Don’t worry, the Constitution is short, not quite four pages, so you’ve got plenty of time.

::five minutes pass — ding!::

Okay, what did you find?

…

Well, okay, maybe that commandment wasn’t a primary source for the founding fathers. Just strike through that one with your black marker and we’ll just keep using the pink highlighter. Go ahead and highlight the second commandment: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” Let’s look for where Madison & co. used that commandment in the Constitution.

Let’s put five minutes back on the timer, and… go!

::five minutes — ding!::

[Since we can all guess how this is going to go, we will now cut to the end of the exercise]

So class, what did you discover?

Sonia, I don’t think it’s fair to say that the Commandments played no role in the creation of the U.S. Constitution. No, I know that we couldn’t find a trace of any of them anywhere in it — and good catch, Clarence, that the right to a fair trial actually comes from the Magna Carta and English common law and not the Ninth Commandment — but maybe we just missed the references. Here’s what we’ll do: Work with your partner and write a letter to Superintendent Walters asking if him to come to our class and show us how we missed it. I bet he’d be delighted to do that!

And class, my apologies for asking you to buy ten different highlighters when only one would have been enough.

Here endeth the lesson.