Parents and civil rights groups sue Louisiana to block ‘disturbing’ Ten Commandments law

A group of Louisiana families with children in public school are suing the state in federal court to block a new state law requiring every public school classroom to display the Ten Commandments.

The plaintiffs include parents from multi-faith backgrounds – including rabbis and pastors – represented by a coalition of civil rights groups arguing that the law violates long-standing Supreme Court precedent and First Amendment protections against the government from injecting religion into schools.

“Permanently posting the Ten Commandments in every Louisiana public-school classroom – rendering them unavoidable – unconstitutionally pressures students into religious observance, veneration, and adoption of the state’s favored religious scripture,” according to the lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in Baton Rouge on Monday.

Republican Governor Jeff Landry signed the legislation from a Catholic school auditorium last week after announcing that he “can’t wait to be sued” by turning Louisiana into the first state to mandate the Ten Commandments in schools.

Landry’s law appears to be designed to invite a federal court battle that will work its way to the Supreme Court. Conservative Christian legal groups have been angling for another shot at reversing Supreme Court rulings protecting the separation of church and state for decades.

Plaintiffs in the lawsuit – which takes aim at state school officials – have argued that the law not only flies in the face of First Amendment protections but also “sends the harmful and religiously divisive message that students who do not subscribe to the Ten Commandments – or, more precisely, to the specific version of the Ten Commandments [the law] requires schools to display – do not belong in their own school community and should refrain from expressing any faith practices or beliefs that are not aligned with the state’s religious preferences.”

Plaintiffs include a Unitarian Universalist minister, her husband and their two children; a Presbyterian minister and his three children; a Jewish father and his two elementary-age children; and other Unitarian and nonreligious families.

“This law is a disturbing abuse of power by state officials,” according to Heather L Weaver, senior staff attorney for the ACLU’s Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief. “Louisiana law requires children to attend school so they can be educated, not evangelized.”

Louisiana’s law requires all schools to display the text exactly as written in the bill, and in “a poster or framed document that is at least eleven inches by fourteen inches” – at minimum – and “in a large, easily readable font.”

It also requires a 200-word “context statement” arguing that the Ten Commandments were “a prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries” up until 50 years ago.

The plaintiffs are represented by the ACLU, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, the Freedom from Religion Foundation, with pro bono counsel from Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP.

Reverend Jeff Sims, a Presbyterian minister with three children in St. Tammany Parish public schools, said it is “critical for my children to receive and understand scripture in the context of our faith which honors God’s diversity and teaches that all people are equal.”

The state’s Ten Commandments law not only interferes with that principle, “it tramples on it,” he told reporters on Monday.

Louisiana officials have produced legislation to “usurp God’s authority for themselves and trample our religious freedom rights,” he said.

Josh Herlands, who has two children in New Orleans public elementary schools, said Louisiana’s specific state-approved version of the Ten Commandments “are not the commandments as I and many Jews know them.”

The display spells out the name of God, for example.

Louisiana law threatens to “distort the Jewish significance of the Ten Commandments” and sends a “troubling message” that his children are considered “less than” for not subscribing to what is written, he said.

Rachel Laser, whose group Americans United for the Separation of Church and State argued at the Supreme Court in another major First Amendment test in 2022, said Louisiana’s law is a “prime example of the Christian nationalism that is on the march across this country,” from mandating religious displays in schools to supporting book bans and installing chaplains in classrooms.

The political ideology is “a fundamental threat to our democracy,” she said.