Texas cannot request public schools in Houston, Austin and other selected districts to display the ten commandments in every classroom, a judge said on Wednesday in a short-lived decision against the recent requirements of the state.
Texas is the third state in which the courts have blocked the latest laws on the integration of the ten commandments in schools.
A group of families from the school districts was looking for an injunction against the law that comes into force on September 1st. They say that the requirement violates the protection of the first change for the separation of church and state and the right to free religious movement.
Texas is the largest state that has tried such a requirement, and the US district judge Fred Biery from San Antonio is the youngest in an expanded legal dispute, which is expected to finally enhance in front of the Supreme Court of the United States.
“Although the ten commandments would not be affirmed, the captured audience of the pupils probably have questions that the teachers would feel forced to answer. That is what they are doing,” wrote Biery, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton, in the decision that ends with the citation of the first packaging and ends with “Amen”.
The judgment prohibits the 11 districts and their affiliated companies to publish the displays required under state law. The law is questioned by a group of Christian, Jewish, Hindu, universalist and non -religious families of the Unitarians and non -religious families, including clergymen who have children in public schools.
A more comprehensive lawsuit that are pending three districts in the Dallas region as well as the state education authority and the commissioner before the Federal Court. And although the judgment marks a great victory for bourgeois freedom groups on Friday, the legal dispute is probably far from it.
The Attorney General of Texas, Ken Paxton, said that he had to appeal to the judgment and called it “faulty”.
“The ten commandments are a cornerstone of our moral and legal heritage, and their presence in classrooms is reminiscent of the values that lead the responsible citizenship,” said the Republican in a statement and repeated feelings of religious groups and conservatives who support the law.
Texas has offered a monument of ten on the captains and won a case of the Supreme Court in 2005, which confirmed the monument.
The families who sued were represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, who united Americans for the separation of church and state and the freedom of religion foundation.
“The court confirmed what we have said for a long time: public schools are for upbringing and not to evangelize,” said Tommy Buser-Clancy, senior employee at the ACLU of Texas, in a statement.
A Federal Court of Appeal blocked a similar law in Louisiana, and a judge in Arkansas announced four districts that they could not set up the posters, although other districts in the state said they did not set them up. In Louisiana, the first state to show the ten commandments in classrooms, a body of three judges decided in June that the law was unconstitutional.
In his 55-page decision, the judge Bier quoted both the cases of Louisiana and Arkansas. It also contains extensive historical references, quotes that range from the founding fathers to evangelists Billy Graham, and even a Rembrandt painting by Moses, which holds the stone tablets together with a picture of the actor Charlton Heston in the film “The Ten Commands”.
The exhibitions in classrooms, wrote Biery, would probably put pressure on the parents of the parents who challenge them to take over the preferred religion of the state and suppress their own religious beliefs. The judge said there are ways to teach the students the history of the ten commandments without being placed in any classroom.
“For those who do not agree with the decision of the court and would do this with threats, vulgarities and violence, grace and peace,” he wrote. “May humanity of all faiths, beliefs and non-belief are reconciled.”
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This story has been updated to correct that the judgment covers certain school districts in Texas, not in the entire state, and to correct the identity of the plaintiffs and accused.
