Gov. Greg Abbott is poised to sign Senate Bill 10, the bill that would require every public-school classroom in Texas to display a poster of the Ten Commandments. If and when he does, a coalition of four civil liberties organizations plans to file a lawsuit to prevent its implementation.
The quartet includes the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the ACLU of Texas, the Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and the Freedom from Religion Foundation. Three of those organizations already are suing to strike down Louisiana's Ten Commandments school display law. A federal district court has blocked the Louisiana law as unconstitutional, and the law is on hold pending review by the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
"The Louisiana case has striking similarities to the law that was passed here in Texas, SB 10," said Chloe Kempf, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Texas.
Kempf said the Louisiana law and the Texas measure that’s on the verge of becoming law violate two aspects of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. First, she said, the Louisiana law and SB 10 both violate the Free Exercise Clause, the part of the amendment that guarantees the freedom to hold religious beliefs without government interference.
SB 10, Kempf said, "takes these really vulnerable students, who are legally required to be at public school, and shows them this indoctrinating, conspicuous religious message every day, and it intrudes on their parents' rights to choose how to bring up their children in religious education."
The second ground for challenging the Louisiana and Texas measures, Kempf said, is that they violate the Establishment Clause, the part of the First Amendment which prohibits the government from making any law respecting the establishment of a state-sponsored religion.
"The text of the bill very clearly lays out the exact text of the Ten Commandments that will be allowable under SB 10, and that represents the Legislature picking and choosing which religious doctrines and translations are correct and which will be favored under the law, which is also unconstitutional," Kempf said.
Specifically, SB 10 uses a translation from the King James Bible that is depicted on a monument outside the Texas State Capitol. State Rep. Candy Noble (R-Lucas), who sponsored the bill in the Texas House, said this was designed to reduce the risk of legal challenges, as that monument had already been approved by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 2005 decision, Van Orden v. Perry.
Democratic representatives made the case during the House debate over SB 10 that the display of the Ten Commandments on a monument in an adult setting was very different from its display in a classroom, where children and teenagers are compelled to be present. Further, several Democrats said, the use of an explicitly Protestant version of the Ten Commandments could be seen as discriminatory against Jewish and Catholic students, whose faiths use different translations.
A 1980 Supreme Court ruling, Stone v. Graham, prohibited Ten Commandments displays in public-school classrooms, saying they violated the Establishment Clause. Noble and other Republican lawmakers argued that a 2022 Supreme Court ruling, Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, overturned the precedent on which Stone was based and therefore Stone was also invalidated.
Not so, said Kempf.
"Ever since Stone v. Graham, including in the Kennedy case, the Supreme Court has made very clear that they are worried about religious indoctrination in schools where students are this captive audience," Kempf said. "They are under the control of the school and school officials, and they're required to be there by law. So, to us, nothing in what the Supreme Court has done has undermined our argument that SB 10 is a blatantly unconstitutional bill."
The coalition would mount its lawsuit on behalf of interested Texas public-school families.
"Many have already reached out to our organizations," Kempf said. "But we would encourage everyone who has a child in public school and who's concerned about this law to contact us."
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