More than two dozen Texas families are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down the state's law requiring Ten Commandments displays in public school classrooms, a challenge that could settle the issue for similar laws now spreading across the South.
The families, represented by the ACLU and allied groups, filed their petition on Monday after the conservative-leaning 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Texas law in a narrow 9-8 ruling in April. That decision reversed lower federal court orders that had blocked several Texas school districts from hanging the posters, and it cleared the path for a nearly identical law in Louisiana.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, signed the law, which took effect last September. It requires classrooms to display the Ten Commandments, but only if the posters are donated, not purchased with public funds. Conservative groups and individuals wasted no time. As the school year opened, they dropped off boxes of posters at campuses across the state. Those displays have now hung in Texas classrooms for close to a year, reaching a student population of roughly 5.5 million.
Texas is not alone. Louisiana, Arkansas, and Alabama have all enacted comparable measures. The ACLU's Heather Weaver framed the petition as a bid for a definitive national ruling.
Weaver told the Associated Press:
"This is an issue of nationwide importance because a number of states have been considering these laws in recent years."
She added that the petitioners want the Supreme Court "to make clear that singling out Scripture for display in public schools is a violation of the First Amendment."
The petitioners' brief put the stakes in personal terms, arguing that the law forces children, a captive audience, to sit beneath a religious text for the entirety of their public school education:
"The question of whether a state may impose scripture on impressionable, captive-audience children, for nearly every hour of every school day, for up to 13 years, implicates the most fundamental guarantees of the First Amendment and our Nation's highest ideals."
That language is designed to tug at the justices' sympathies. But it skips past a basic fact: no child is compelled to recite, memorize, or affirm the text on the poster. The 5th Circuit said exactly that in its April opinion.
The appellate court's majority distinguished between requiring students to engage with a religious text and simply posting one on the wall. In its ruling, the court stated plainly:
"No child is made to recite the Commandments, believe them, or affirm their divine origin."
That distinction matters. A poster on a classroom wall is not a catechism class. Students are not tested on the material. They are not asked to pray. The Texas law does not even spend taxpayer money on the displays, it relies entirely on donated posters. Opponents treat the mere presence of a foundational moral and legal text as an act of government coercion, a framing that the 5th Circuit's majority rejected.
Still, the vote was close. Eight judges on the 5th Circuit dissented, and the petitioners are banking on that slim margin to persuade the Supreme Court that the legal question is unsettled enough to warrant review.
The ACLU's strongest card is a 1980 Supreme Court decision that struck down a similar Kentucky law. In that case, the high court found the Kentucky statute had "no secular purpose" and served "a plainly religious purpose," violating the establishment clause, the First Amendment provision that bars Congress from making "any law respecting an establishment of religion."
But the legal terrain has changed considerably since 1980. The current Supreme Court has shown greater willingness to accommodate religious expression in public life, and the Texas law's donation-only funding mechanism is a deliberate attempt to distinguish it from the Kentucky statute. Whether those differences are enough to survive review is the central question the petition raises.
Ken Paxton's office, representing Texas as attorney general, did not immediately comment on Monday's filing.
The Supreme Court has not yet said whether it will take the case. If it does, several unresolved issues will shape the outcome. The status of similar laws in Arkansas and Alabama, whether they face their own legal challenges, could influence the justices' sense of urgency. So could the practical record in Texas, where the posters have been displayed for nearly a year without reported disruption.
The petitioners want the court to see a constitutional crisis. Supporters of the law see something simpler: a text that shaped Western legal tradition, posted on a wall, paid for with private money, and forced on no one.
If the ACLU gets its way, the message to every state legislature in the country will be clear, the Ten Commandments are welcome in courthouses, on monuments, and in private life, but not where 5.5 million Texas children might read them. Whether that outcome protects religious liberty or simply punishes it may depend on which side of the wall you are standing on.
