Background: FILE – A copy of the Ten Commandments is posted along with other historical documents in a hallway of the Georgia Capitol, Thursday, June 20, 2024, in Atlanta (AP Photo/John Bazemore, File). Inset: Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry speaks with reporters outside the U.S. Supreme Court after justices heard oral arguments in Murthy v. Missouri, a first amendment case involving the federal government and social media platforms in Washington, D.C., March 18, 2024 (Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP Images).
The Louisiana citizens who want to stop the state from forcing schools to post the Ten Commandments in classrooms say that the state is “deeply and bizarrely obsessed with imposing the commandments on students” — and should be stopped from doing so.
As Law&Crime previously reported, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, signed a bill in June requiring all public schools in the Pelican State display the Ten Commandments “on a poster or framed document” in each classroom. The law was immediately slammed by experts and activists as “blatantly unconstitutional,” and families with school-age children filed a federal lawsuit looking to block the law, which set a deadline of Jan. 1, 2025, for schools to comply.
On Aug. 5, the defendants — a collection of various officials and school boards — filed motions to dismiss the case. On Monday, the families fired back, arguing that the law blatantly violates the Constitution and fails to protect public school students.
Specifically, the plaintiffs said that the defendants’ insistence that the Ten Commandments can be displayed alongside various explanations and contexts — such as the historical value of other sets of laws and rules — fail to make the law constitutional.
“Regardless of variations in content, the minimum requirements of the Act demand permanent displays that all feature one unavoidable constant as their focus: a state-adopted, Protestant version of the Ten Commandments,” the filing says.
For kids in public school, the plaintiffs say, there is no way to avoid the imposition of the state’s chosen religion. Even if students switch classes, schools, or even school districts within the state, “so long as they attend a Louisiana public school, they will not be able to escape the specific biblical scripture adopted and prescribed by the State.”
“No matter the details of any one display, the Act’s broad scheme to impose on students — for nearly every hour they are in school, day in and day out, for the duration of their public-school education — an official, denominational version of the Ten Commandments will injure the minor child Plaintiffs and their parents,” the opposition filing continues.
Louisiana’s “relentless imposition of a religiously preferential version of the Ten Commandments on public-school students” is “unconstitutional on its face and cannot be applied without violating Plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights.”
Citing Supreme Court precedent finding that “children are particularly susceptible to religious indoctrination at school, both because they are captive audiences to the state’s religious messages and because they are vulnerable to the immediate impressions and judgments of their teachers and classmates if they do not fall in line with the state’s preferred religious beliefs,” the plaintiffs refute the state’s assertion that variations among the individual displays undermine any Establishment Clause arguments.
“Defendants’ ‘illustrations,’ even if they were not irrelevant to Plaintiffs’ facial challenge, would merely put a finer point on the matter, demonstrating that the State is deeply and bizarrely obsessed with imposing the commandments on students and will do whatever it can to shoehorn its preferred version of that religious doctrine into any number of displays,” the filing says.
The plaintiffs continue:
Whether schools decide to display one or more of Defendants’ hypothetical posters, or use posters featuring other content, the common denominator, from classroom to classroom and school to school, will be the State’s mandatory version of the Ten Commandments. Students will be acutely aware of the lengths to which the State has gone in ensuring that they encounter these displays in every classroom for nearly every minute of their school day, and students will reasonably feel religiously coerced by the State’s desperate insistence that they take heed of the commandments. The Supreme Court effectively recognized this … holding that the only function served by such permanent and pervasive displays is “to induce … schoolchildren to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate and obey, the Commandments.”
The plaintiffs refuted the defendants’ arguments that no injury has yet occurred because the displays haven’t been put up, and the plaintiffs don’t know the full context. However, they say that is only a matter of time, as state officials have publicly stated their intention with the law’s Jan. 1, 2025, deadline to comply.
“Regardless of the content or parameters of any one display, the minimum statutory requirements, operating together, will injure the minor-child Plaintiffs and their parents in the myriad ways set forth in the Complaint,” the filing says. “These injuries will commence as soon as the Act is implemented and displays of the Ten Commandments are put up in the minor-Plaintiffs’ school. Plaintiffs are not required to suffer those harms before this Court may exercise jurisdiction over their claims.”
Not only would an injunction barring enforcement of the law protect the children, the filing says, it would “preserve the ability of the parent-Plaintiffs to direct their children’s religious education and upbringing.”
The filing calls out the state’s lawyers for pulling from a concurrence from Justice Neil Gorsuch — a conservative Donald Trump appointee — and holding it up as enforceable law.
“What Defendants refer to as the ‘Kennedy hallmarks’ are plucked not from the Court’s majority opinion in that case, but from Justice Gorsuch’s concurrence in Shurtleff v. Boston,” the filing says, referring to Gorsuch’s concurrence in a Massachusetts case the high court considered around the same time as Kennedy v. Bremerton, which found that a public school football coach could pray on the field after every game. “The Court has never held that a government act must neatly invoke one of these six ‘hallmarks’ to violate the Establishment Clause. On the contrary, the Kennedy Court’s Establishment Clause approach was not so circumscribed, commanding only that ‘the Establishment Clause must be interpreted by reference to historical practices and understandings.””
The plaintiffs also refute the defendants’ claim that the state actors are entitled to sovereign immunity and note that, in general, the defendants “fail to offer any evidence demonstrating any influence of the Ten Commandments on the American legal system and government at the Founding” of the country.
The preliminary injunction hearing is set for Sept. 30. before U.S. District Judge John W. deGravellas, a Barack Obama appointee.
Read the opposition to the motion to dismiss here.
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