The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit voted 12-6 on Friday to lift a lower-court block on Louisiana's law requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public school classrooms.
The ruling allows the mandate to proceed for now, handing a significant victory to the state and to religious liberty advocates who have argued for years that America's founding traditions belong in the public square.
According to Fox News, the full court found it was too early to determine the constitutionality of the law, choosing to "permit judicial judgment rather than speculation." Translation: let the law actually take effect before deciding whether it violates anything. A novel concept in an era where activist judges routinely kill laws before they draw a single breath.
The road to Friday's ruling was not short. A block on the law was first imposed in 2024, and a three-judge panel subsequently ruled it unconstitutional. Months later, the full Fifth Circuit agreed to reconsider the case, and it was that full-court review that produced Friday's 12-6 decision.
Circuit Judge James Ho, appointed by President Donald Trump, wrote a concurring opinion that left little ambiguity about where he stood:
"It is fully consistent with the Constitution, and what's more, it reinforces our Founders' firm belief that the children of America should be educated about the religious foundations and traditions of our country."
Ho called the Louisiana law "consistent with our founding traditions" and said it "affirms our Nation's highest and most noble traditions." This is not a judge stretching to find justification. It is a judge reading history plainly.
Circuit Judge James L. Dennis, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, dissented. He warned against "exposing children to government-endorsed religion in a setting of compulsory attendance."
"That is precisely the kind of establishment the Framers anticipated and sought to prevent."
The disagreement is revealing. One side reads the First Amendment as a shield for religious expression in public life. The other reads it as a broom to sweep religious expression out of it. The Fifth Circuit's majority chose the shield.
Predictably, the ACLU of Louisiana and allied groups were not pleased. Their joint statement called the ruling "extremely disappointing" and warned it would "unnecessarily force Louisiana's public school families into a game of constitutional whack-a-mole in every school district."
The framing is instructive. The ACLU treats a poster of the Ten Commandments as a harm requiring legal action. Not a school safety failure. Not a collapsing literacy rate. A poster. One that says, among other things, don't kill and don't steal.
Attorney Joseph Davis, representing Louisiana, offered a sharp counter:
"If the ACLU had its way, every trace of religion would be scrubbed from the fabric of our public life."
Davis added that the ACLU's position "is at odds with our nation's traditions and our Constitution." He is not wrong. The same Founders who drafted the Establishment Clause opened congressional sessions with prayer, funded chaplains with public money, and engraved religious language into the architecture of the republic's most important buildings. The idea that they intended a sterilized public square, scrubbed of every acknowledgment of God, requires ignoring virtually everything they did.
Republican Gov. Jeff Landry celebrated the ruling on Facebook with characteristic directness: "Common sense is making a comeback!"
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill struck a more operational tone, saying schools "should follow the law." She pointed out that her office has already issued guidance and created poster examples demonstrating constitutional compliance. Then she made the point that ought to end the debate before it starts:
"Don't kill or steal shouldn't be controversial. My office has issued clear guidance to our public schools on how to comply with the law, and we have created multiple examples of posters demonstrating how it can be applied constitutionally."
That is the core absurdity the ACLU cannot escape. The Ten Commandments contain moral principles that virtually every legal system on earth recognizes. The objection is not really to the content. It is to the source.
Louisiana is not alone. Texas implemented its own Ten Commandments classroom requirement last year, and a similar law in Arkansas faces a federal court challenge. A pattern is emerging: red states are reasserting the role of religious heritage in public education, and the courts are, at a minimum, giving those efforts room to operate.
For decades, the legal establishment treated any religious display in a public school as a constitutional emergency. That consensus is fracturing. The Fifth Circuit's ruling does not declare Louisiana's law constitutional in a final sense. It says the lower court moved too fast in blocking it. But the signal matters. A 12-6 vote from the full court is not a squeaker. It is a statement.
The left will frame this as theocracy creeping into classrooms. They always do. But the children of Louisiana are not being asked to pray, confess, or convert. They are being asked to read a document that shaped Western civilization's understanding of law, morality, and human obligation. The Founders would not have found that controversial. The Fifth Circuit doesn't either.
