This is an opinion column.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

A bill before the Alabama Legislature would require the Ten Commandments to be displayed prominently in every Alabama school.

The legislation follows a call by Gov. Kay Ivey in her most recent State of the State Address to hang the Almighty’s Top Ten in classrooms throughout the state.

That sensation you might be experiencing is Alabama deja vu, where our state ignores history in the hopes that we might repeat it.

But in this case, insanity isn’t doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. The insanity, this time, is that something different might happen — thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Deja vu, all over again

In Alabama, the Ten Commandments isn’t only a religious text, but an incantation. Repeat those words too many times and Roy Moore might emerge from the void to rant about the Founding Fathers.

But when it comes to legal history, Alabama’s Ten Commandments Judge was mostly a side character — too late to be of any significance then and too early to be of any significance today.

No, this story starts in Kentucky.

In 1980, Kentucky went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to defend a law that — and this might sound familiar — required the display of the Ten Commandments in public schools. In Stone v. Graham, the court ruled that such displays violated were unconstitutional.

Over and done, then?

Hardly.

Religious folks who couldn’t take no for an answer have been trying to find a loophole ever since.

When Moore hung his hand-carved Ten Commandments plaque on his Gadsden courtroom wall in 1992, the Stone decision had been in place for 12 years. Moore rode the media attention, winning election to the Alabama Supreme Court, where as chief justice, he installed a washing machine-sized monument of the Big Ten (complete with a Roy Moore copyright carved into its base).

A federal judge ordered the monument removed, and when Moore refused, the Alabama Court of the Judiciary removed Moore from the bench.

Meanwhile and elsewhere

While Moore won the war for media attention, the more important legal battles over religious displays on public property were being waged in other states.

Twenty-five years after Stone, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down two seemingly contradictory decisions regarding the Ten Commandments on the same day in 2005.

Some judges in Kentucky — those guys again — followed Roy Moore’s lead, decorating a courthouse with the Ten Commandments. That case landed before the high court. In McCreary County v. ACLU of Kentucky, the court ruled against Kentucky’s religious displays — again.

But in the other case, Van Orden v. Perry, the court ruled that a nearly 40-year-old Ten Commandments monument on the Texas capitol grounds in Austin could stay put.

Four of the justices said the monument had a historic and secular context, but the important voice in this case was the swing vote, Justice Stephen Breyer.

Breyer believed that the government should remain neutral regarding religion. While new displays might violate such neutrality, Breyer believed ripping up decades-old monuments, not previously subject of any controversy, would violate that neutrality, too.

In short, Breyer’s opinion defended old religious displays on public grounds.

But now folks want to use that case to create new ones.

Back to the (Alabama) future

Fast forward 20 years, and Alabama today is just one of a handful of states trying to deck the halls of public buildings with the Ten Commandments.

The latest Ten Commandments bill before the Alabama Legislature attempts to thread a needle. The bill tries to use that SCOTUS ruling about old displays, which the bill plainly mentions, as cover for putting up new displays in Alabama schools.

The bill frames the Ten Commandments as a secular thing, a foundational document and legal ancestor to the U.S. Constitution and American justice system, along with the Mayflower Compact and the Declaration of Independence.

This argument might hold muster if it required those documents to be displayed, too, but it doesn’t — only the Ten Commandments — and that’s where it tells on itself.

Alabama is not alone. Louisiana passed a very similar bill — as in identical sentences, copied and pasted — into law last year. More states, including Texas, Mississippi and Pennsylvania, are considering similar bills.

When he signed the Louisiana bill into law, Gov. Jeff Landry said he hoped he’d get sued. He got his wish. A federal judge has since ruled the law was “unconstitutional on its face.”

That case is still making its way through the courts.

Meanwhile, Alabama isn’t going to let Louisiana walk away with all the action. Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey has endorsed the new bill, saying last month:

“There is a place for the Ten Commandments and other key historical documents in our classrooms. We will always be a state that supports our strong Alabama values.”

What’s different this time?

But here’s the thing. The SCOTUS ruling on old displays is nearly 20 years old. Why did it take two decades for lawmakers in Alabama and other states to find it? What’s new now? It’s not the law that’s changed. It’s the justices.

And it’s not the 20-year-old ruling on a Ten Commandments monument in Texas that has the religious legal warriors excited. It’s the Dobbs ruling on abortion.

Republican appointees on the Supreme Court now hold a six-to-three majority. When that majority overruled Roe v. Wade with its Dobbs decision, the court demonstrated its willingness to overturn established precedents.

When Roe ceased to be “settled law” as Justice Brett Kavanaugh described it to Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, it unsettled everything else.

“I do think that it is a jolt to the legal system when you overrule a precedent,” Chief Justice John Roberts testified at his confirmation hearing in 2005. “Precedent plays an important role in promoting stability and evenhandedness.”

Apparently, stability and evenhandedness were a cost worth paying for the court’s majority.

So when you think to yourself, “Didn’t we do this already?,” the answer is yes, we did. But it didn’t matter.

Precedents only mean something when judges stick to them, and the nation’s highest court has told us that all bets are off. Everything is up for grabs. Just because the likes of Roy Moore hit dead ends before doesn’t mean they will now. Twenty-five

When it comes to change today in Alabama — and in America — regression is always on the table. The future might very well look like the past.

Kyle Whitmire is the Washington watchdog columnist for AL.com and winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. You can follow him on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, X , Threads and Bluesky.