Civil rights groups to sue Texas over Ten Commandments bill

AUSTIN (KXAN) — The ACLU and other civil rights groups announced plans Thursday to challenge a newly passed Texas bill requiring public schools display a copy of the Ten Commandments in each classroom, according to press releases.

That bill, Senate Bill 10, passed in the Texas House of Representatives on May 25 with an amendment, as KXAN previously reported. The Senate concurred with the House’s changes on May 28.

The final bill sent to Governor Greg Abbott clarified that Texas, not its school boards, will be responsible for any legal challenges. Abbott has yet to sign the bill into law, but he said that he would sign it in a May 1 social media post.

The ACLU will be joined in its challenge by Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

Multiple SCOTUS rulings in focus

SB 10 author Sen. Phil King, R-Weatherford, argued in his statement of intent that the law could survive a legal challenge under the US Supreme Court’s (SCOTUS) 2022 ruling in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District.

“For 200 years, the Ten Commandments were displayed in public buildings and classrooms across America,” wrote King in his bill analysis. “The Court has … provided a test that considers whether a governmental display of religious content comports with America’s history and tradition. Now that the legal landscape has changed, it is time for Texas to pass SB 10 and restore the history and tradition of the Ten Commandments in our state and our nation.”

ACLU Staff Attorney Chloe Kempf said that SCOTUS’s ruling in Stone v. Graham, which struck down a similar Kentucky law, still applies.

“The Supreme Court has never overruled it. And in fact, in more recent years, including in the Kennedy case, the Supreme Court has affirmed that there is a special constitutional concern when we are indoctrinating students in school with religious messages,” she said. “The Kennedy case … really has no relationship to a bill that requires a religious text to be posted in schools.”

A similar law in Louisiana was to take effect in 2025, but was blocked by a US District Court ruling. It is currently before a US Fifth Circuit Appeals Court. That law did not require school districts to fund the posters with taxpayer money. SB 10 allows such an expense but doesn’t require it.

“The result in either case is the same — you have children being religiously coerced in schools, and you have the government favoring a very specific religious translation above all others. So I would say the outcome is unconstitutional in either way,” Kempf said.

Which, and whose, ‘Ten Commandments’?

SB 10 requires schools use specific text for their Ten Commandments posters, which Kempf identified as an additional problem with it.

“It’s a Protestant translation … we heard from a lot of concerned Texas families that even in their religious traditions … that do recognize the 10 Commandments, their versions are meaningfully different than the version that the Texas Legislature chose here,” she said.

Earlier in the legislative session, 166 faith leaders in Texas signed a letter of opposition against SB 10.

“The responsibility for religious education belongs to families, houses of worship, and other religious institutions — not the government,” the letter reads. “The government oversteps its authority when it dictates an official state-approved version of any religious text.”

In fact, the biblical books of Exodus and Deuteronomy contain a total of three different versions of the Ten Commandments. These passages also vary by religion and translation: The King James Version (KJV) of Exodus 20:13 reads, “thou shall not kill,” while the New International Version of the same verse reads “you shall not murder.”

SB 10’s version is also found on a monument outside the Texas State Capitol. A legal challenge over that monument went before the US Supreme Court in 2005, with SCOTUS ruling in Texas’ favor, allowing the monument to remain as it constituted a passive display.

“The placement of the Ten Commandments monument on the Texas State Capitol grounds is a far more passive use of those texts than was the case in Stone, where the text confronted elementary school students every day,” wrote former Justice William Rehnquist in the court’s opinion.

The monument’s and SB 10’s take on the Ten Commandments appear to be cut-down from the King James Version of the Christian Bible, removing some text and changing “thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s wife … nor his ox, nor his ass,…” to “thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s wife … nor his cattle, … .”