Texas cannot require public schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom, a judge said on Wednesday in a temporary ruling against the state’s new requirement, making it the third such state law to be blocked by a court.
A group of Dallas-area families and faith leaders sought a preliminary injunction against the law, which goes into effect on 1 September. They say the requirement violates the first amendment’s protections for the separation of church and state and the right to free religious exercise.
Texas is the largest state to attempt such a requirement, and US district judge Fred Biery’s ruling from San Antonio is the latest in a widening legal fight that’s expected to eventually go before the US supreme court.
“Even though the Ten Commandments would not be affirmatively taught, the captive audience of students likely would have questions, which teachers would feel compelled to answer. That is what they do,” Biery wrote in the 55-page ruling that began with quoting the first amendment and ended with “Amen”.
“[T]he displays are likely to pressure the child-Plaintiffs into religious observance, meditation on, veneration, and adoption of the State’s favored religious scripture, and into suppressing expression of their own religious or nonreligious background and beliefs while at school.”
Biery continued: “There is also insufficient evidence of a broader tradition of using the Ten Commandments in public education, and there is no tradition of permanently displaying the Ten Commandments in public-school classrooms. There are ways in which students could be taught any relevant history of the Ten Commandments without the state selecting an official version of scripture, approving it in state law, and then displaying it in every classroom on a permanent basis.”
The lawsuit names the Texas education agency, state education commissioner Mike Morath and three Dallas-area school districts as defendants.
Hailing the preliminary injunction, plaintiff Rabbi Mara Nathan said: “As a rabbi and public school parent, I welcome this ruling. Children’s religious beliefs should be instilled by parents and faith communities, not politicians and public schools.”
Heather Weaver, senior counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief, echoed similar sentiments.
“Public schools are not Sunday schools. Today’s decision ensures that our clients’ schools will remain spaces where all students, regardless of their faith, feel welcomed and can learn without worrying that they do not live up to the state’s preferred religious beliefs,” Weaver said.
Meanwhile, Freedom From Religion Foundation co-president Annie Laurie Gaylor said: “Religious instruction must be left to parents, not the state, which has no business telling anyone how many gods to have, which gods to have or whether to have any gods at all.”
A federal appeals court has blocked a similar law in Louisiana, and a judge in Arkansas told four districts they cannot put up the posters, although other districts in the state said they’re not putting them up either.
Although Friday’s ruling marked a major win for civil liberties groups who say the law violates the separation of church and state, the legal battle is likely far from over.
Religious groups and conservatives say the Ten Commandments are part of the foundation of the United States’s judicial and educational systems and should be displayed. Texas has a Ten Commandments monument on the Capitol grounds and won a 2005 supreme court case that upheld the monument.
In Louisiana – the first state that mandated the Ten Commandments be displayed in classrooms – a panel of three appellate judges in June ruled that the law was unconstitutional.
