On Wednesday, August 20th, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking a new state law requiring public schools to display donated posters of the Ten Commandments in Texas classrooms from taking effect. The ruling technically applies only to the nearly a dozen Texas school districts named in the suit, although attorneys for the plaintiffs, Rabbi Mara Nathan et al, think other Texas school districts will now be hesitant to implement the law.
In his decision in the case of Rabbi Mara Nathan, et al. v. Alamo Heights Independent School District, et al, U.S. District Judge Fred Biery concluded that the law runs afoul of the non-establishment clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”—by privileging Protestant Christianity over other religious faiths and atheism.
The fact that the version selected for display was the “Protestant” version of the Decalogue played a significant role in Judge Biery’s decision. “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,” Biery wrote in his opinion, adding that the law “crosses the line from exposure to coercion.”
Texas is expected to appeal the ruling, but the appeal will go to the same court of appeals, the Fifth Circuit, that recently blocked Louisiana's Ten Commandments law from taking effect.
Oral arguments in the Texas case, Rabbi Nathan v. Alamo Heights Independent School District, concluded on Monday, several weeks after the plaintiffs, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, sued the state over what their lawyers called "catastrophically unconstitutional” legislation. In court, the parties debated the influence of the Ten Commandments on the country's legal and educational systems, and whether the version of the Ten Commandments required to be posted in schools belongs to a particular religious group.
Supporters of the measure argued that, beyond their religious significance, knowledge of the Ten Commandments is vital to understanding American history and culture (including its jurisprudential history), but Judge Biery ruled that the real purpose of the measure was to use mandatory public education to inculcate, in a coercive manner, the Protestant Christian religion.
All sides agree that this issue will likely end up at the Supreme Court of the United States, but for the conservatives states to prevail in that venue, the SCOTUS would need to overturn its 1980 decision in Stone v. Graham, which struck down a Kentucky law similar to the recent wave of state statutes.