Civil rights groups have petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to block a Texas law requiring the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom, setting up a First Amendment fight that could reshape religious liberty law nationwide.
The ACLU, representing more than two dozen Texas families, filed the petition after the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the law in a narrow 9-8 ruling in April. That decision reversed lower court orders that had blocked the law and overturned a 1980 Supreme Court precedent that struck down a nearly identical Kentucky statute. Now the families want the justices to step in and restore the old rule, or write a new one.
Texas Senate Bill 10, passed by the Republican-led state legislature just over a year ago, requires every public school classroom in the state to display a "durable poster or framed copy" of the Ten Commandments, with specifications for size and typeface. AP News reported the law affects roughly 5.5 million public school students, and posters have already gone up in classrooms since the law took effect last September.
The challengers are families from diverse religious backgrounds who say the law forces a state-endorsed version of scripture on children who may follow different faiths, or none at all. Their Supreme Court brief frames the stakes in sweeping terms.
Rebekah and Ted Lowe, two of the plaintiffs, put it plainly in a statement reported by Breitbart:
"This law puts one version of religious beliefs above all other in our public schools and sends a message to our children that what we teach them about religion at home is somehow wrong."
The legal battle turns on a single question: does a 1980 Supreme Court ruling still control? In that case, Stone v. Graham, the justices struck down a Kentucky law requiring Ten Commandments displays in public school classrooms, finding it had no secular purpose and served only a religious one. The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment says Congress can "make no law respecting an establishment of religion," and for decades courts applied that principle to bar these displays.
The Fifth Circuit said that precedent no longer holds. The appeals court's reasoning rested on a 2022 Supreme Court decision, Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, which Fox News reported abandoned the old "Lemon test", a legal framework courts had used for decades to evaluate whether government actions violated the Establishment Clause. With that framework gone, the Fifth Circuit concluded Stone v. Graham lost its foundation.
The court's majority wrote that the Texas law "looks nothing like a historical religious establishment."
"It does not tell churches or synagogues or mosques what to believe or how to worship or whom to employ as priests, rabbis, or imams. It punishes no one who rejects the Ten Commandments, no matter the reason."
The ruling added: "No child is made to recite the Commandments, believe them, or affirm their divine origin."
Jonathan Saenz, president of Texas Values, called the Fifth Circuit decision "one of the most important religious liberty victories for Texas in our glorious history," Fox News reported.
But the vote was 9-8, hardly a consensus. And the ACLU argues the ruling "conflicts with this Court's precedents" and has "deepened confusion among the lower courts over how this Court's Establishment Clause jurisprudence applies," Just The News reported.
That confusion extends beyond Texas. The Fifth Circuit's April ruling also approved a similar law in Louisiana. Meanwhile, an Arkansas judge ruled a comparable state law unconstitutional in March, creating a direct split among lower courts, exactly the kind of conflict the Supreme Court typically steps in to resolve.
The ACLU is treating this case as a generational rematch. Cecillia Wang, the organization's national legal director, drew a direct line to the Kentucky fight nearly half a century ago.
"Fifty years ago, the ACLU won a Supreme Court victory against a nearly identical Kentucky law, and we aim to do it again. In our country, no legislature can force its preferred scripture on public school students and families."
Chole Kempf, an ACLU of Texas attorney, told FOX 7 Austin the law endangers students directly.
"The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected this kind of government-imposed religion before, and it should do so again. Having these posters in Texas classrooms puts students at risk of bullying, stigmatization, and religious coercion."
Kempf also argued that the law crosses a line between government authority and family autonomy over faith: "Our nation's bedrock principle of separating church and state means that families and faith communities, not politicians, get to decide what role religion plays in children's lives."
The families' Supreme Court brief frames the issue in terms of duration and captivity:
"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 thirteen years, implicates the most fundamental guarantees of the First Amendment and our Nation's highest ideals."
Supporters of the law see the ACLU's framing as overheated. The Fifth Circuit's majority made clear no student is compelled to read, recite, or believe the posted text. And the National Review noted that during oral arguments, multiple Fifth Circuit judges pushed back hard on the ACLU's reliance on the abandoned Lemon test, with Judge Kyle Duncan making clear the court understood that framework no longer guides Establishment Clause analysis.
Andrea Picciotti-Bayer, writing for National Review, argued: "The Constitution protects religious liberty; it does not mandate historical amnesia."
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has not waited for the Supreme Court. He required more than two dozen school districts to "produce documents regarding the display or lack thereof of the Ten Commandments and their policies regarding SB 10," signaling the state intends to enforce the law aggressively regardless of pending litigation.
Paxton called the Fifth Circuit ruling "a major victory for Texas and our moral values."
The enforcement push adds practical urgency. With posters already hanging in classrooms across the state, a Supreme Court decision to hear the case would put millions of students, parents, and school administrators in legal limbo while the justices deliberate. A refusal to hear it would leave the Fifth Circuit's ruling, and the overturning of Stone v. Graham, as the law of the land across Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi.
The current composition of the Supreme Court makes the case's trajectory hard to predict. The Kennedy v. Bremerton decision that reshaped Establishment Clause law came from a 6-3 conservative majority. Whether that same majority views a classroom poster mandate as consistent with its own framework, or as a step too far, remains an open question.
Heather Weaver, another ACLU attorney involved in the case, told AP News the goal is clear: "We would like for the Supreme Court to make clear that singling out Scripture for display in public schools is a violation of the First Amendment."
The case also arrives at a moment when the Court is handling a heavy docket of politically charged disputes, from election-related challenges to questions about future appointments that could shift the bench for a generation.
Several key questions remain unanswered. The Supreme Court has not yet said whether it will hear the case. No timeline for a decision on the petition has been announced. And the precise legal standard the justices would apply, if they take it up, is itself part of the dispute, since the old test was discarded but no detailed replacement has been spelled out for classroom display cases.
For now, the Ten Commandments hang on classroom walls across Texas. Whether they stay there depends on nine justices who will have to decide whether a poster on a schoolroom wall amounts to government-imposed religion, or simply an acknowledgment of a text that shaped the legal tradition the Court itself sits atop.
The ACLU wants the Court to treat a classroom poster like a constitutional crisis. The Fifth Circuit looked at the same poster and saw no coercion, no compulsion, and no establishment of religion. If the justices take the case, they will not just be ruling on Texas, they will be deciding whether the government can acknowledge the moral foundations of its own legal system without a federal judge ordering the acknowledgment torn down.
