Texas to become third state to require Ten Commandments be posted in classrooms
Plan appears to violate a U.S. Supreme Court ruling made in 1980
Texas is about to become the third state to require the posting of the Ten Commandments in public-school classrooms.
The Texas House yesterday approved the final amended version of Senate Bill 10 on an 82-46 vote, sending it to Gov. Greg Abbott for his signature. Abbott has said he would sign the bill. “Let's get this bill to my desk. I'll make it law,” Abbott wrote on X (formerly Twitter) on May 1.
Although its implementation is likely to be delayed by court challenges, the Texas law is scheduled to go in effect Sept. 1, roughly the start of the upcoming school year.
The bill is similar to legislation passed earlier in Louisiana and Arkansas. Louisiana’s legislation has been successfully challenged in federal court and is awaiting judicial action on an appeal. The Arkansas legislation, scheduled to go in effect next Jan. 1, has not been challenged in court, although a lawsuit is likely.
Opponents of the Texas bill, including the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas and Americans United for Separation of Church and State, have promised to bring a court challenge soon.
The Texas bill requires that a “durable poster or framed copy of the Ten Commandments” be posted in “a conspicuous place” in every public elementary or secondary school classroom. The sign is not to include any text other than the specified version of the Ten Commandments and be “legible to a person with average vision from anywhere in the classroom in which the poster or framed copy is displayed.”
The text specified in the legislation is a highly abridged version of the Ten Commandments from the book of Exodus in the King James Version of the Bible. It begins with “I AM the LORD they God.” The numbering scheme used in this version is one commonly used by Protestants; although Catholics and Jews also have the Ten Commandments as part of their scriptures, they divide the text into commandments differently.
As was the case in Louisiana and Arkansas, the Texas legislation had strong Republican support and strong Democratic opposition.
Most likely, implementation of the Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana laws would require the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse a 1980 decision, Stone v. Graham, it which it found a similar Kentucky law unconstitutional. The 5-4 ruling found that the Kentucky law “had no secular legislative purpose” and was “plainly religious in nature” — one argument that the ACLU and other opponents have been making with the current round of legislation.
Obviously, supporters of the new laws are hopeful that the current Supreme Court will be more amenable to this type of legislation than is was 45 years ago. In the past decade, the court has generally been friendly to efforts by various states and local school boards to have public-school students exposed to religious instruction.