Another state law aiming to display the Ten Commandments in classrooms has been blocked, making it the third time a court has pushed back in recent months on red states looking to promote the historical doctrine.
A federal judge in Texas blocked school districts on Wednesday from enforcing S.B. 10, which mandates a poster of the Ten Commandments be hung in every public school classroom.
U.S. District Judge for the Western District of Texas Fred Biery said the requirement could burden children and interfere with parents’ rights to raise their children according to certain religious beliefs.
The Biden appointee also noted that the Texas law “impermissibly takes sides on theological questions and officially favors Christian denominations over others” and is “not neutral with respect to religion.”
“One need only look at the states of Israel and Iran to see the conflicts which arise when government and religion become closely intertwined,” he wrote, issuing a preliminary injunction halting the law from taking effect next month.
The American Civil Liberties Union challenged the requirement, representing a group of parents from mixed or no faith backgrounds.
It was the latest win for advocates championing the separation of church and state.
A federal judge in Arkansas had also shut down the effort earlier this month.
“Why would Arkansas pass an obviously unconstitutional law? Most likely because the state is part of a coordinated strategy among several states to inject Christian religious doctrine into public-school classrooms,” wrote Judge Timothy L. Brooks, an Obama appointee, in the Arkansas ruling.
The state laws were nearly identical.
Louisiana has also suffered a blow in the courts with the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that the law requiring the Ten Commandments be posted ran afoul of the Constitution.
Liz Murrill, Louisiana’s attorney general, said the state will keep battling — even all the way to the Supreme Court.
Advocates against the Ten Commandments posters note that roughly 40 years ago, in Stone v. Graham, the justices ruled it was unlawful for Kentucky to order classrooms to display the Ten Commandments in violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, which forbids the government from excessive entanglement with religion.
The states have said they’re not trying to promote religion but rather celebrate the centrality of the Ten Commandments themselves as history and as a critical source of legal authority in the American experiment.
