ACLU Asks Supreme Court to Block Commandments Law

Texas requires every public school classroom in the state to prominently display the text of the Ten Commandments, in the King James version. This week, lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union asked the U.S. Supreme Court to step in and rule the law unconstitutional.

The ACLU represents a group of Texas families whose children attend Texas public schools and who, the petition says, are "of diverse faiths and beliefs—including Baha'ism, Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, Unitarian Universalism, and nonreligious traditions."

The question is whether a state mandate to post scripture in every classroom is a law "respecting the establishment of religion" — which the First Amendment forbids.

The legal posture

The challengers are standing on precedent that is directly on point. In Stone v. Graham (1980), the Supreme Court struck down a nearly identical Kentucky law requiring the Ten Commandments to be posted in public school classrooms.

"This is not a case in which the Ten Commandments are integrated into the school curriculum, where the Bible may constitutionally be used in an appropriate study of history, civilization, ethics, comparative religion, or the like," the Court said then. "If the posted copies of the Ten Commandments are to have any effect at all, it will be to induce the schoolchildren to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate and obey, the Commandments. However desirable this might be as a matter of private devotion, it is not a permissible state objective under the Establishment Clause."

The ACLU is also using a more recent decision — one won by religious parents. In Mahmoud v. Taylor (2025), the Court held that the free exercise right is infringed when a school "substantially interfere[s] with the religious development" of a family's child or poses "a very real threat of undermining" the beliefs and practices a parent wants to instill.

The brief turns that against the Texas mandate: "if the permanent, unavoidable imposition of biblical scripture in public-school classrooms does not interfere with, or threaten to undermine, parents' ability to direct their children's religious education…it is difficult to imagine what would."

Why the outcome is not obvious

Precedent favors the challengers. The current Court's appetite for that precedent is another matter.

Justice Clarence Thomas has argued the Establishment Clause should limit only the federal government. It is, he has written, "a federalism provision" which "resists incorporation" — meaning it was never meant to be applied against the states through the 14th Amendment. On that reading the clause "protects state establishments from federal interference" but "does not protect any individual right."

Writing in Reason, senior editor Damon Root said he does not expect the Court to go that far if it takes the case. But he noted that other conservative justices have complained that modern Establishment Clause doctrine is too hostile to religious displays and observances by state officials, including public school teachers and coaches — views that could cut in favor of the Texas law.