Bill to Force Texas Public Schools to Display Ten Commandments Fails
“The law has undergone a massive shift,” said Matt Krause, a former Texas state representative and a lawyer at First Liberty Institute, a conservative legal nonprofit focused on religious liberty, during a State Senate hearing last month. “It’s not too much to say that the Kennedy case, for religious liberty, was much like the Dobbs case was for the pro-life movement.”
In recent months, religious groups in several states have appeared interested in seeing how far states might now go in directly supporting religious expression in public schools. This month, the South Carolina legislature introduced its own bill to require the display of the Ten Commandments in all classrooms. In Oklahoma, the state education board was asked earlier this year to approve the creation of an explicitly religious charter school; the board ultimately rejected the application.
“Forcing public schools to display the Ten Commandments is part of the Christian Nationalist crusade to compel all of us to live by their beliefs,” said Rachel Laser, the president and chief executive of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a nonprofit advocacy group. She pointed to new laws in Idaho and Kentucky permitting public school employees to pray in front of students, and a bill in Missouri allowing elective classes on the Bible. “It’s not just in Texas,” she said.
The Texas bill on displaying the Ten Commandments resembled another bill, passed in 2021 during the last legislative session, that required public schools to accept and display donated posters bearing the motto “In God We Trust.” Patriot Mobile, a conservative Christian cellphone company outside of Fort Worth, was among the first to make such donations after the bill’s passage.
But the legislation on the Ten Commandments went further. It required schools to display posters of the words and to do so “in a conspicuous place in each classroom” and “in a size and typeface that is legible to a person with average vision from anywhere in the classroom.”
Source: The New York Times
