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A group of parents, teachers, and ministers have filed a lawsuit to stop Oklahoma from purchasing a Bible for every school in the state.

As previously reported, over the summer Oklahoma Superintendent Ryan Walters, a Republican, announced plans to purchase a Bible for every school in the state.

“Effective immediately, all Oklahoma schools are required to incorporate the Bible, which includes the Ten Commandments, as an instructional support into the curriculum across specified grade levels, e.g. grades 5 through 12,” he said.

“The Bible is an indispensable historical and cultural touchstone. Without basic knowledge of it, Oklahoma students are unable to properly contextualize the foundation of our nation which is why Oklahoma educational standards provide for its instruction,” he added.

He finally moved forward with the plan last month:

Flash forward to Thursday, when a group of parents, teachers, and ministers filed a lawsuit with the Oklahoma Supreme Court.

The suit seeks “to stop the state’s top education official from forcing schools to incorporate the Bible into lesson plans for students in grades 5 through 12” and to stop Walters “from spending $3 million to purchase Bibles in support of his mandate,” according to ABC News.

The suit reportedly alleges that the order violates the Oklahoma Constitution because it requires that public money be spent to support a religious cause and it also favors one religion over another on account of Walters’ decision to buy only the Protestant version of the Bible.

“As parents, my husband and I have sole responsibility to decide how and when our children learn about the Bible and religious teachings,” plaintiff Erika Wright, the founder of the Oklahoma Rural Schools Coalition, said in a statement. “It is not the role of any politician or public school official to intervene in these personal matters.”

The lawsuit also contains a previously debunked accusation that Walters purposefully chose so-called Trump Bibles for this project.

The accusation is based on the fact that the Bibles chosen for this endeavor must include the Old and New Testaments, in addition to copies of the Pledge of Allegiance, the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.

The problem, critics have claimed, is that only one Bible contains all of these: Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the U.S.A. Bible. And this, you see, is a problem because the big bad orange man has endorsed it.

“We can see there are very few Bibles on the market that would meet these criteria, and all of them have been endorsed by former President Donald Trump,” Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law and Justice Executive Director Colleen McCarty complained to Oklahoma Watch, a leftist nonprofit.

State Rep. Andy Fugate, a rabid leftist, even went so far as to accuse Walters of trying to suck up to former President Donald Trump.

“This is not about access to Bibles,” he told Oklahoma City station KOKH. “It’s about Ryan Walters sucking up at the national level. Pure and simple.”

Oklahoma Democrat Party Chair Alicia Andrews was equally nasty about it.

“For [Walters] to craft this RFP, to specifically identify this Bible, this document that the state taxpayers would spend money on, either is a dereliction of duty, a dereliction of stewardship or maybe it is a … signal to former President Trump: ‘Hey, hey, I’m on your team, sir,’” she said.

She and others reportedly believe that Walters is trying to earn himself a cabinet position in Trump’s administration if he wins the upcoming presidential election.

Walters has responded to the lawsuit by vowing to never bow down to the “woke mob.”

Look:

“Oklahomans will not be bullied by out-of-state, radical leftists who hate the principles our nation was founded upon,” he wrote in the lengthy tweet above. “The simple fact is that understanding how the Bible has impacted our nation, in its proper historical and literary context, was the norm in America until the 1960s and its removal has coincided with a precipitous decline in American schools.”

“It is not possible for our students to understand the American history and culture without understanding the Biblical principles from which they came, so I am proud to bring back the Bible to every classroom in Oklahoma. I will never back down to the woke mob, no matter what tactic they use to try to intimidate Oklahomans,” he added.

Vivek Saxena
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