In a tongue-in-cheek order, U.S. District Judge Fred Biery for the Western District of Texas granted a preliminary injunction preventing Texas Senate Bill 10, which is set to kick in on Sep. 1, from going into effect while the case plays out in court.
In an order that opened with a heading titled "In The Beginning ... " — a playful reference to the Bible's opening sentence — and ended with "Amen," Judge Biery said the displays are likely to coerce children into observing Texas' "favored" religion and interfere with parents' rights to direct their children's religious education.
"These impositions on Plaintiffs' religious beliefs and practices cannot be sustained under strict scrutiny," the judge wrote.
Signed into law on June 21 by Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, Texas S.B. 10 requires a copy of the Ten Commandments — specifically, a Protestant version — to be posted in every public school classroom in the state. The law includes specifics ensuring that posters with the scriptures are clearly visible to children with average vision from anywhere in the classroom.
A group of Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Unitarian Universalist and nonreligious families with children in public schools sued several independent school districts across the state in July, arguing that the law, which is set to kick in on Sept. 1, violates the First Amendment's establishment and free exercise clauses.
Texas is now the third state where a federal court has blocked a law imposing a Ten Commandments display in public schools. Last year, a federal district court ruled that a Louisiana law imposing an almost identical version of the scriptures violated the First Amendment, and a federal appeals court upheld the ruling. And earlier this month, a federal judge blocked a similar law in Arkansas.
"Public schools are not Sunday schools," Heather L. Weaver, an ACLU senior staff attorney representing the plaintiffs, said in a statement Wednesday. "Today's decision ensures that our clients' schools will remain spaces where all students, regardless of their faith, feel welcomed and can learn without worrying that they do not live up to the state's preferred religious beliefs."
Attorneys with the Texas attorney general's office, which represents the school districts except Houston's, declined to comment. Representatives for the office and counsel for Houston's school district did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The plaintiffs were also represented by nonprofits Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the Freedom from Religion Foundation. A team of attorneys with Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP worked on the case pro bono.
In an interview with Law360, Weaver said Texas S.B. 10 was part of a trend of states across the country seeking to use public schools to impose religion and "convert students to the state officials' preferred brand of Christianity."
She cited bills, some of which have been enacted, to allow chaplains in public schools, promote school-sponsored prayer or change public school curricula to insert Christian beliefs into them.
"This is part of a much broader effort, and we take it very seriously," Weaver said.
Mara Nathan, a Jewish rabbi at a San Antonio temple and 21 other adult plaintiffs, said in a complaint that the Ten Commandments display would forcibly subject their children to "scriptural dictates" that conflict with the parents' desire to teach them other faiths or no faiths at all.
"The displays will pressure students, including the minor-child Plaintiffs, into religious observance, veneration, and adoption of the state's favored religious scripture," the plaintiffs said. "This simply cannot be reconciled with the fundamental religious-freedom principles that animated the Founding of our nation."
In the complaint, which was filed alongside a motion asking the court to block S.B. 10, the plaintiffs cited U.S. Supreme Court precedent that forbids the placement or religious scriptures in public school classrooms: In 1980's Stone v. Graham
, the justices struck down a Kentucky law mandating classroom displays of the Ten Commandments, holding that such displays would unconstitutionally "induce ... schoolchildren to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate and obey, the Commandments."The plaintiffs also cited the high court's June 27 decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor
, which found that the Montgomery County School District in Maryland violated the First Amendment by revoking parents' ability to exclude their children from reading books with LGBTQ+ themes that purportedly conflict with their religious beliefs.In a brief opposing the plaintiffs' motion for preliminary injunction and seeking dismissal of the lawsuit, attorneys with the Texas attorney general's office argued that S.B. 10 did not involve the type of religious coercion that concerned the framers of the Constitution when they drafted the First Amendment.
"History indicates long-standing public uses of the Ten Commandments, including in classrooms," the state brief says. "Given this deep historic pedigree, there is no reason to see the public display of the Ten Commandments as the establishment of a state religion"
But Judge Biery disagreed. In granting the plaintiffs' motion on Wednesday, he wrote that the Supreme Court has already found the imposition of religious activities such as mandatory prayers unconstitutional.
"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," he wrote, adding that the defendant schools had made no efforts to find alternatives.
In explaining his broader reasoning on religious freedom, Judge Biery proposed a thought experiment: What if the city council of Hamtramck, Michigan, a majority-Muslim enclave in Detroit, had required that scriptures in the Quran similar to the Ten Commandments be posted in public school classrooms?
"While 'We the people' rule by a majority, the Bill of Rights protects the minority Christians in Hamtramck and those 33 percent of Texans who do not adhere to any of the Christian denominations," he said.
While giving a brief primer on the origins of religious faith — sometimes referencing the Gospels, other times pop songs, books or famous actors — Judge Biery said many forms of religious beliefs were part of the "American experience and experiment of democracy and self-government."
"While religious institutions bestow many blessings and try to alleviate suffering, those acts of Grace are neutralized by religious Homo sapiens who exhibit an historical and continuing pernicious and pervasive tendency to kill other humans and confiscate the property of those, sometimes even within the same religion, who do not believe as they do," Judge Biery wrote in his order, which included a photograph of Adolf Hitler shaking hands with a bishop at a Nazi rally in 1934. "That violent history gives rise to the question: 'Haven't we evolved?' Other than size and longevity, the answer clearly is: 'Of course not.' 'The Beat Goes On.'"
Going through the history of state impositions of religious beliefs that have been rejected by courts on constitutional grounds, Judge Biery warned against the interference of religion on secular matters.
"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.
At the bottom of his order, Judge Biery offered some soothing words to people who might be displeased with his decision:
"For those who disagree with the Court's decision and who would do so with threats, vulgarities and violence, Grace and Peace unto you," the judge said. "May humankind of all faiths, beliefs and non-beliefs be reconciled one to another. Amen."
The plaintiffs are represented by Heather L. Weaver and Daniel Mach of American Civil Liberties Union Foundation, Thomas Paul Buser-Clancy of ACLU Foundation of Texas, Chloe Kempf and Adriana Cecilia Pinon of the ACLU of Texas, Kristen Crow, V. Noah Gimbel, Janet A. Gochman, Avia Gridi, Jordan Ti Krieger, and Jonathan K. Youngwood of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP, Patrick C. Elliott, Samuel Troxell Grover, Nancy A. Noet of Freedom From Religion Foundation Inc., and Alexander Joseph Luchenitser, Amy Tai, Jessica Zalph and Alexandra Zaretsky of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
William Howard Farrell and Daniel Ortner of the Texas Office of Attorney General.
Houston Independent School District is represented by Eric J.R. Nichols, John R. Johnson, II of Butler Snow LLP
The case is Nathan et al. v. Alamo Heights Independent School District et al., case number 5:25-cv-00756, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas
--Editing by Alanna Weissman.
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