More than two dozen Texas families on Monday asked the Supreme Court to review a state law requiring public school classrooms to display the Ten Commandments, in a case that could alter the separation between church and state.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, along with several other legal and religious-liberty advocacy groups such as Americans United for Separation of Church and State, filed a petition that says a lower court ruling upholding the law “gutted the religious freedom rights of public-school children and parents.”
The filing contends the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ignored a 1980 Supreme Court decision that struck down as unconstitutional a nearly identical Kentucky statute requiring the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms.
The issues in the case would be of “exceptional national importance” for the high court to review, the plaintiffs said in the filing, since legislatures in dozens of states have considered laws on displaying the Ten Commandments over the past two years.
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“If left in place, the decisions below could embolden state and local governments not only to enact more Ten Commandments laws, but to attempt other incursions on public-school families’ religious freedom, creating an administrative nightmare and litigation risk for school districts and diminishing, to an alarming extent, parents’ control over key aspects of their children’s religious education,” the filing says.
The 9-8 majority opinion in the 5th Circuit found that a 2022 Supreme Court decision allowing a high school football coach to engage in prayer with students made the precedent in the Kentucky case obsolete. The minority of the court held that only the Supreme Court, not a lower court, can overturn decisions from the nation’s highest court.
The families argue that in addition to “egregiously violat[ing]” Supreme Court precedent, the Texas state law infringes upon “both the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment.”
The families attend 22 school districts across the state and come from Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Baha’i, Unitarian Universalist and nonreligious backgrounds. The petition groups together two separate but similar cases filed against the Texas state law.
“As a rabbi and parent, forcing a Christian version of the Ten Commandments on children in every classroom is particularly upsetting,” one of the plaintiffs, Rabbi Joshua Fixler, said.
The display of the Ten Commandments on government property has led to lengthy court battles across the nation. In 2001, then-Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore installed a more than 5,000 pound monument of the Ten Commandments on the state’s judicial building grounds. Moore was removed from office in 2003 after refusing to comply with a federal court decision to remove the statue.
While the most recent copy of the Republican Party’s platform — released ahead of the 2024 election — does not explicitly advocate for the Ten Commandments to be displayed in classrooms, the document champions “the First Amendment Right to Pray and Read the Bible in school.”
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