Clinton-Appointed Judge Blocks Texas Law Requiring Schools Display The Ten Commandments

A U.S. district judge appointed by former President Bill Clinton temporarily blocked a new Texas law for some school districts on Wednesday, preventing them from being required to display the Ten Commandments in classrooms.

Texas Senate Bill 10 (S.B. 10) was signed into law by Republican Governor Greg Abbott in June. It stated, “a public elementary or secondary school shall display in a conspicuous place in each classroom of the school a durable poster or framed copy of the Ten Commandments.”

The bill stated the Commandments would be listed thus:

I AM the LORD thy God. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.    

Thou shalt not  make to thyself any graven images.   

Thou shalt not take the Name of the Lord thy God in vain.   

Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.   

Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.   

Thou shalt not kill. 

Thou shalt not commit adultery. 

Thou shalt not steal. 

Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. 

Thou shalt not covet they neighbor’s house. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his cattle, nor anything that is thy neighbor’s.   

Texas would be the largest state to require the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public schools. Louisiana was the first to pass a law last year, but a federal appeals court blocked it.

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But U.S. District Judge Fred Biery issued an injunction on Wednesday that barred 11 school districts named as defendants in a lawsuit from displaying the Ten Commandments. Other public school districts in the state are still bound by the law, which takes effect September 1.

“Even though the Ten Commandments would not be affirmatively taught, the captive audience of students likely would have questions, which teachers would feel compelled to answer,” Biery wrote. “There is also insufficient evidence of a broader tradition of using the Ten Commandments in public education, and there is no tradition of permanently displaying the Ten Commandments in public-school classrooms. … 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.”

In 1980, in the case Stone v. Graham, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that posting the Ten Commandments in Kentucky public schools violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment in the U.S. Constitution. Justice William Rehnquist issued a blistering dissent in which he noted:

The Court rejects the secular purpose articulated by the State because the Decalogue is “undeniably a sacred text.”  It is equally undeniable, however, as the elected representatives of Kentucky determined, that the Ten Commandments have had a significant impact on the development of secular legal codes of the Western World.

The Establishment Clause does not require that the public sector be insulated from all things which may have a religious significance or origin. This Court has recognized that “religion has been closely identified with our history and government,” Abington School District, and that “[t]he history of man is inseparable from the history of religion,” Engel v. Vital. Kentucky has decided to make students aware of this fact by demonstrating the secular impact of the Ten Commandments.

He quoted Justice Robert Jackson, concurring in the 1948 case McCollum v. Board of Education, who wrote:

I think it remains to be demonstrated whether it is possible, even if desirable, to comply with such demands as plaintiff’s completely to isolate and cast out of secular education all that some people may reasonably regard as religious instruction. Perhaps subjects such as mathematics, physics or chemistry are, or can be, completely secularized. But it would not seem practical to teach either practice or appreciation of the arts if we are to forbid exposure of youth to any religious influences. Music without sacred music, architecture minus the cathedral, or painting without the scriptural themes would be eccentric and incomplete, even from a secular point of view. …

I should suppose it is a proper, if not an indispensable, part of preparation for a worldly life to know the roles that religion and religions have played in the tragic story of mankind. The fact is that, for good or for ill, nearly everything in our culture worth transmitting, everything which gives meaning to life, is saturated with religious influences, derived from paganism, Judaism, Christianity–both Catholic and Protestant–and other faiths accepted by a large part of the world’s peoples. One can hardly respect the system of education that would leave the student wholly ignorant of the currents of religious thought that move the world society for a part in which he is being prepared.