[Photo credit: Katie Barlow]
Texas recently became the third state in two years, following Louisiana and Arkansas, to pass a law requiring Ten Commandments displays in public school classrooms. Soon after — like the other states that had passed such a law — it was sued over this policy.
Like the complaints filed already in Louisiana and Arkansas, the lawsuit against Texas’ Ten Commandments statute was brought by a group of families from multiple religious backgrounds who believe that the law violates the First Amendment. According to the families, students in classrooms with the Ten Commandments posters “will be forcibly subjected to scriptural dictates, day in and day out,” a situation that violates “the fundamental religious-freedom principles that animated the Founding of our nation.”
The Texas challengers, as well as the families in Arkansas and Louisiana, drew on a case from 1980, Stone v. Graham, in which the Supreme Court ruled, in an unsigned decision, that a Kentucky statute requiring a copy of the Ten Commandments to be hung in every public school classroom violated ...
