OPINION: Blaine Conzatti’s left hand is unaware of his right

What Blaine Conzatti and the Idaho Family Policy Center want from the Idaho Legislature, they often get.

Last year, the far-right Christian lobby sought — and got — a bill placing a bull’s-eye on librarians, who are accused of including among their collections materials deemed “harmful to minors.”

This year, Conzatti wants lawmakers to mandate Bible readings in the public schools.

His bill — introduced in the House Education Committee — would require readings from the Bible “each morning of each instructional day in each occupied classroom in all public schools.” The selections should be read “sequentially and completed over 10 school years ... without comment or interpretation.”

Teachers and students can opt out.

All of which raises a few questions:

If the state of Idaho is going to convert the education of some 313,000 public school students into religious instruction, what’s the point of spending another $50 million in vouchers to subsidize private religious schools attended by some 16,843 to 22,271 children? According to Idaho Education News, two of every three private schools in Idaho already are religious — and four of every five of those are Protestant.

If tax dollars are already going toward daily biblical lessons, wouldn’t throwing another $50 million at religious schools constitute duplication? What would Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency say about this redundant waste of public funds?

About the only discretion local schools seem to have is when to start the process. Launch it in kindergarten and the lessons end with high school freshmen. Or they could wait another three years, thereby finishing with high school seniors. Here’s the tricky part: Since the Bible must be read in sequence, do you time it so that first-graders get introduced to the Book of Leviticus?

How many students — especially the older ones — are going to resist asking a pertinent question about what was just read to them? Will they be satisfied with — as the bill requires — being told to ask Mom or Dad or transform themselves into their generation’s version of comedian George Carlin?

Since no comments or interpretation are allowed, how does a teacher handle some of the Bible’s more disturbing elements — adultery, genocide, rape or slavery? By the same token, wouldn’t a book with such material be deemed “harmful to minors” and get shunned from the school library under the bill Conzatti got approved last year?

Last time anyone checked, there are a lot of nonreligious families, even in Idaho. So how do you handle the relatively large number of children who will opt out of state-sponsored Bible school? Do you round them up and warehouse them in the hallway? How disruptive is that? To say nothing of divisiveness. By the first week, you’ll have camps consisting of the devout and the not-so-devout.

What about the teachers in hard-to-fill jobs who may practice civil obedience — or simply “forget” one or more daily Bible readings? Assuming a principal who is already overwhelmed with curriculum, staffing, resources, scheduling and monitoring an entire school stays on top of which teachers are complying, do you think she will risk a vacancy in the science, math or special education programs?

Conzatti doesn’t just want to impose Bible lessons on Idaho’s school children. He wants to impose his Bible — “the King James version, the new King James version, or the revised standard version of the Bible.” As the Idaho Statesman’s Bryan Clark notes, that freezes out non-Christian faiths — Jews, Hindus, Muslims as well as agnostics and atheists. There will be no readings from the Book of Mormon. Also excluded: the New American Bible Revised Edition approved by the U.S. Catholic bishops.

Conzatti can argue all he wants about his interpretation following an Idaho tradition established by a 1925 law. But if he’s going to get anywhere, he needs to get a majority on the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn its 1963 Abington School District v. Schempp ruling, which found state-sponsored Bible readings violated the Constitution’s Establishment Clause.

Note to Conzatti: Six of the nine Supreme Court members — Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh — are Roman Catholic.

Give Conzatti this much: He’s following the biblical admonition to “let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.” — M.T.