To add to that, Slacktivist explains the origins of the text specified in the bill, which was put together in the 1950s by a judge and a “patriotic fraternity”.
A Minnesota juvenile court judge named E.J. Ruegemer started sentencing young people who’d gotten into trouble with the law to study the 10 commandments with a local pastor. Ruegemer and his local chapter of Eagles then got the idea of distributing posters of the commandments to judges, teachers, principals, and local government officials all over the country in the hopes of instilling “good moral conduct in American youth.” (Richard Lindsay found one of these original Fraternal Order of Eagles Commandments poster prints on eBay and posted an image here.)
In a statement on the back of each poster, Ruegemer wrote, “The Fraternal Order of Eagles is first of all a patriotic fraternity. It requires of its membership in the initial obligation the belief in the existence of a Supreme Being.” His version of the Ten Commandments, then, was a civil religious tool designed to have interdenominational, interfaith appeal.
Since Jews, Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, and other traditions all number the Ten Commandments differently, Ruegemer’s poster tries to avoid alienating any of those groups by simply not numbering them. And because different traditions favor different translations, he paraphrases slightly from the King James Version he used as a starting point. That’s why the language of the poster is KJV-ish, but not always actually KJV.
