A federal appeals court on Friday unanimously upheld a lower court’s injunction blocking Louisiana’s law requiring a display of the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom—a decision that may be consequential now that other states have adopted similar laws.
“If the posted copies of the Ten Commandments are to have any effect at all, it will be to induce the schoolchildren to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate and obey, the Commandments,” said a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, in New Orleans. “This is not a permissible state objective under the Establishment Clause,” the provision of the First Amendment that forbids any government establishment of religion.
The court agreed that the Louisiana law, H.B. 71, is impermissible under Stone v. Graham, the 1980 U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down a similar Kentucky law that required displays of the Ten Commandments in classrooms.
“Under Stone, H.B.71 is plainly unconstitutional,” said the opinion by Judge Irma Carrillo Ramirez, an appointee of President Joe Biden, said in Roake v. Brumley. She was joined by Senior Judge James L. Dennis, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, and Judge Catharina Haynes, an appointee of President George W. Bush.
Arkansas this year passed a similar law requiring Ten Commandments displays in classrooms and libraries, and it was challenged this month in a lawsuit. But Arkansas is in a different federal court circuit, the 8th Circuit.
Texas lawmakers this year passed a bill requiring similar Ten Commandments displays, as well as a separate bill permitting school boards to set aside time for student prayer and Bible reading. Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, has not yet signed those bills. He faces a June 22 deadline to decide. If he neither signs nor vetoes them, they will become law.
A debate over history and tradition
The Louisiana law was originally set to require the displays by Jan. 1 of this year, but it was blocked by a federal district judge in November. State officials have defended the requirement as being consistent with U.S. history and tradition, and they offered numerous sample displays that showed the Commandments alongside founding U.S. documents or even playfully next to “classroom rules.”
The 5th Circuit’s June 20 decision rejected arguments by the state that Stone no longer applied because it relied on an Establishment Clause test for government involvement with religion from the 1971 case of Lemon v. Kurtzman, a case the Supreme Court overruled in its 2022 decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District. That case upheld a high school football coach’s post-game prayers.
Ramirez said in the opinion that only the Supreme Court can overrule Stone.
The panel agreed with the district judge that Louisiana lawmakers had offered a “sham” legislative purpose, citing statements from some of them such as, “It is so important that our children learn what God says is right, and what he says is wrong,” or that opponents were waging a “war on Christianity.”
“These statements indeed support a commonsense conclusion that a religious objective permeated the government’s action,” Ramirez said.
The court also held that the 2022 Kennedy decision would support striking down the Louisiana law because it put an emphasis in Establishment Clause cases on looking to historical practices and traditions.
The court noted that an expert who testified in support of the challengers to the Louisiana law, renowned constitutional and legal historian Steven Green, had testified that there is little evidence that the Ten Commandments were displayed in early American public schools.
The appeals court said it was not clearly erroneous for the district judge to have concluded that there was insufficient evidence of historical practice to justify the Louisiana law.
Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which was behind the challenge along with the American Civil Liberties Union, said the decision “should send a strong message to Christian Nationalists across the country that they cannot impose their beliefs on our nation’s public school children. Not on our watch.”
Louisiana officials did not immediately respond.
