Bill to force Texas public schools to display the Ten Commandments fails
An effort to inject religion into public schools across Texas faltered Tuesday after the State House failed to pass a controversial law that would require the Ten Commandments to be prominently displayed in every classroom.
The move was part of an effort by conservative Republicans in the legislature to expand the reach of religion into the everyday life of public schools. In recent weeks, both chambers passed versions of a bill to allow school districts to hire religious chaplains instead of licensed counselors.
But the Ten Commandments bill, passed by the state Senate last month, remained pending in the Texas House until Tuesday, the last day to pass bills before the session ends next Monday. Time passed before the legislation could come to a vote.
The bills seemed designed to test the willingness of the conservative majority on the Supreme Court to reexamine the legal boundaries of religion in public education. The court last year sided with Washington state football coach Joseph Kennedy in a dispute over his prayers with players at the 50-yard line, saying he had a constitutional right to do so.
“The law has undergone a massive shift,” Matt Krause, a former Texas state representative and attorney with First Liberty Institute, a conservative legal nonprofit focused on religious freedom, said at a Senate hearing last month. “It is not too much to say that the Kennedy case, for religious freedom, was much like the Dobbs case for the pro-life movement.”
In recent months, religious groups in several states have expressed an interest in seeing how far states could now go in directly supporting religious expression in public schools. This month, the South Carolina legislature has introduced its own bill to demand the display of the Ten Commandments in all classrooms. In Oklahoma, the state board of education was asked earlier this year to approve the creation of an explicitly religious charter school; the board ultimately rejected the application.
“Forcing public schools to display the Ten Commandments is part of the Christian nationalist crusade to force us all to live their beliefs,” said Rachel Laser, the president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a non-profit advocacy organization. group. She pointed to new laws in Idaho and Kentucky that would allow public school employees to pray in front of students, and a bill in Missouri that would allow electives on the Bible. “It’s Not Just Texas,” she said.
The Texas bill on displaying the Ten Commandments resembled another bill, passed in 2021 in the last legislative session, that required public schools to accept and display donated posters with the motto “In God We Trust.” Patriot Mobile, a conservative Christian cell phone company outside of Fort Worth, was one of the first to make such donations after the adoption of the bill.
But the legislation surrounding the Ten Commandments went further. It required schools to put up posters of the words and to do so “in a conspicuous place in every classroom” and “in a size and font that is legible to a person with average vision from anywhere in the classroom.”
Schools that do not supply posters themselves will have to accept donations of posters according to the bill. The legislation also specified how the commandments were to be rendered, with the text including prescribed capital letters: “I AM the LORD your God.”
The words, taken from a Protestant version of the commandments from the King James Version of the Bible, are the same as those written on a monument on the grounds of the Texas Capitol. Gov. Greg Abbott, when he was Attorney General, successfully defended the memorial’s placement more than ten years ago for the Supreme Court.
Legislation allowing school districts to employ chaplains or accept them as volunteers was presented as a solution to a problem in Texas and other states: a shortage of school counselors. Opponents of the measure said chaplains failed to meet the need because they did not have the same expertise, training or license as counselors.
“As the bill is framed, a school board could choose to have no counselors, no family specialists, no school psychologists, and replace them entirely with chaplains,” said Diego Bernal, a Democratic representative from San Antonio, at a hearing this month.
“I think if the schools thought that was necessary, they could make that decision,” replied the bill’s sponsor in the State House, Cole Hefner, a Republican representative from East Texas.
The measure, known as Senate Bill 763, passed in the Texas Senate and then the House; now the chambers must agree on a final draft before sending it to Mr Abbott.
The Ten Commandments bill, known as Senate Bill 1515, similarly passed smoothly through the Senate, where Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, a far-right Republican, holds tremendous power. He praised the bill as “a step we can take to ensure that all Texans have the right to freely express their sincere religious beliefs.”
But after going to the Texas House, the legislation faced a problem common in the Republican-dominated legislature, which meets once every two years and whose members were introduced during this session more than 8,000 bills: deadlines in the legislative calendar.
Tuesday was the last day the House could pass bills. While the Republicans rushed to do so, the Democrats, who wield little direct power, slowed down the proceedings by speaking long and repeatedly on every occasion for much of the day, a process known in the Texas State Capitol as “moles.”
By doing so, they prevented the Ten Commandments bill — and many other controversial measures that were placed late in the day’s calendar — from being voted on.
“This bill was an unconstitutional attack on our fundamental freedoms, and we’re glad it failed,” David Donatti, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, said in a statement. “The First Amendment guarantees families and faith communities – not politicians or the government – the right to teach religious beliefs to their children.”