A federal judge on Tuesday ordered several Texas public school districts to take down posters displaying the Ten Commandments, in another victory for opponents of a law signed by the state’s governor earlier this year requiring the religious passage to be prominently posted in all classrooms.
The preliminary injunction from Judge Orlando L. Garcia of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas ordered 14 public school districts to take down the posters by next month.
In June, Gov. Greg Abbot (R) passed a law mandating that the Ten Commandments be displayed in a “conspicuous location” in every classroom. The law required the posters to be at least 16 inches wide and 20 inches tall, with font sizes and typeface that would ensure the text was “legible to a person with average vision from anywhere in the classroom.”
Those who support the law argue that the Ten Commandments — the religious and ethical tenets of the Abrahamic faiths — are a foundational part of U.S. history and culture, while its critics say the mandate violates the separation of church and state.
A group of 15 families from varied religious backgrounds filed a legal complaint against the law in September. Garcia, in his preliminary injunction issued Tuesday, wrote that “it is impracticable, if not impossible, to prevent plaintiffs from being subjected to unwelcome religious displays” without stopping school districts from enforcing the mandate.
Garcia also said the plaintiffs are likely to prevail because the Texas law violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, which prohibits the government from “establishing” a religion.
“Plaintiffs do not wish their children be pressured to observe, venerate, or adopt the religious doctrine contained in the Ten Commandments,” he wrote, noting that the plaintiffs come from backgrounds “including atheist, agnostic, Christian, Jewish, Baha’i and Hindu.”
In August, another federal judge in the Western District of Texas temporarily blocked the Ten Commandments mandate in 11 school districts as the courts weighed the law’s constitutionality.
Combined with Tuesday’s ruling, about 20 percent of Texas public school students are now affected by orders blocking the law, and a broader legal battle over the constitutionality of the Texas law and similar legislation in other states is underway.
In June, a panel of judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit called a Louisiana law mandating Ten Commandments posters in classrooms “plainly unconstitutional.” Months later, a U.S. district judge in Arkansas issued a preliminary injunction against another such law, which affected several school districts.
A federal appeals court is expected to hear the state of Texas’s arguments against the August ruling, as well as review the Louisiana case, in January.
In a statement Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union called Garcia’s ruling “a win for religious freedom and church-state separation.”
“I am relieved that as a result of today’s ruling, my children, who are among a small number of Jewish children at their schools, will no longer be continually subjected to religious displays,” Lenee Bien-Willner, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said in a statement shared by the ACLU. “The government has no business interfering with parental decisions about matters of faith.”
Texas is 42 percent Protestant, 22 percent Catholic and less than 1 percent Jewish, according to a Pew Research Center study last year.
Ben Brasch contributed to this report.
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