A judge has placed a halt on Louisiana’s newly passed law requiring all government-run schools to display the Ten Commandments in each of their classrooms.
The move comes after various groups filed a lawsuit against the state arguing that the law violates the First Amendment. The law will not be enforced until November 15, 2024, according to the court’s ruling.
Both parties agreed that the Ten Commandments will not be posted in any public school classroom and defendants — including the state’s Louisiana State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education — and schools will not publicly move forward on the law’s implementation until November.
Lester Duhe, a spokesperson for the Louisiana Attorney General’s office, clarified that the defendants “agreed not to take public-facing compliance measures” until then because it will give time for “briefing, oral arguments and a decision” ahead of the January 2025 date in which schools have to have the Ten Commandments.
The January requirement still stands pending the outcome of the suit.
A multi-faith group of Louisiana families with children in public schools sued to challenge the law, HB 71, which mandates public schools — from kindergarten to the collegiate level — display the Ten Commandments, a religious set of rules from the Old Testament, in every classroom on “a poster or framed document that is at least 11 inches by 14 inches.”
The plaintiffs are nine families from Jewish, Christian, Unitarian Universalist, and nonreligious backgrounds. They contend that requiring the Ten Commandments to be posted in every classroom violates the Constitution. “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,” the lawsuit asserts.
The complaint argues that the law “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 that H.B. 71 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.”
On the other hand, those supporting the law claim that it is about America’s historical traditions, not religion. “This is not preaching a Christian religion. It’s not preaching any religion. It’s teaching a moral code,” said Republican State Rep. Dodie Horton during a hearing in April
The measure requires that the Ten Commandments poster be no smaller than 11 by 14 inches. It must be “the central focus of the poster” and written in “a large, easily readable font.” The poster must also note that the commandments have been a “prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries.”
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, an ardent proponent of the new law said that defending the measure in court is worth the price that will be paid to the attorneys to litigate the matter. During an interview, he contended that “the benefit of what we’re trying to do certainly outweighs any of the expenditures.”
The law seeks to overturn the 1971 case of Lemon v. Kurtzman, in which the justices ruled the government could not provide funding to nonsecular schools without violating the Establishment Clause. In 1980, the high court took on the Stone v. Graham case, where it ruled based on the Lemon test that a Kentucky law requiring the Ten Commandments in schools was unconstitutional.
The Republican governor insisted that “this is one of the cases where the (Supreme) Court has it wrong.”
As this is a developing story, RedState will provide updates as they become available.
