Arkansas families sue over law requiring Ten Commandments in classrooms

The Plaintiffs say the law pushes Christianity in public schools, and the politicians who voted for it admitted as much

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Arkansas recently passed a law requiring every public school classroom display a copy of the Ten Commandments.

Now they’re getting sued over it.

A Ten Commandments monument (image via Adobe Spark)

Senate Bill 433—later named Act 573—was signed into law in April. In addition to the Christian signs, it required all public buildings to put up a poster reading “In God We Trust.” Its backers insisted none of this had anything to do with promoting religion. (Because they are liars.)

“Every day, as members, we stand on the House floor and we take a pledge of allegiance to one nation under God. We have the ‘In God We Trust’ motto in those same classrooms. We’re not telling every student they have to believe in this God, but we are upholding what those historical documents mean and that historical national motto,” [Republican Rep. Alyssa] Brown said.

Obviously there’s nothing “historical” about the Ten Commandments, at least as it pertains to the laws of this country. Even the motto wasn’t a Founding Fathers Original. It was declared the motto in 1956, when the U.S. was using God as a counterweight to “godless” Communism.

A similar law forcing the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms was passed in Louisiana last year, but in November, a federal judge struck it down as unconstitutional. In the process, the judge dismantled the idea that there was anything traditional about putting this Christian display in classrooms:

In sum, the historical evidence showed that the instances of using the Ten Commandments in public schools were too “scattered” to amount to “convincing evidence that it was common” at the time of the Founding or incorporation of the First Amendment to utilize the Decalogue in public-school education... That is, the evidence demonstrates that the practice at issue does not fit within and is otherwise not consistent with a broader historical tradition during those time periods.

He also argued that the facts of the case violated a Supreme Court ruling from nearly five decades ago, Stone v. Graham, that declared a virtually identical law in Kentucky unconstitutional. (Ominously, he wrote, “this District Court remains bound to follow Stone until the Supreme Court overrules it.”)

The bottom line is this was all about promoting Christianity, and everybody knew it, and that’s why it was correctly declared illegal. (Louisiana has since appealed that decision.)

So when Arkansas passed its version of the law, the expectation was that it would lead to a lawsuit, and that lawsuit would be successful.

The first part of that statement has now happened. Seven families with kids in Arkansas public schools, with a variety of religious backgrounds, have filed a federal lawsuit to prevent the law from going into effect. They are represented by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the ACLU of Arkansas, the ACLU (national), and the Freedom From Religion Foundation. (Simpson Thacher Bartlett LLP is assisting with the case for free.) Those are basically the same groups that filed the Louisiana lawsuit.

Interestingly enough, they’re not suing the state. This lawsuit goes after the school districts. It says the kids in those families shouldn’t be force-fed this harmful religious messaging.

Permanently posting the Ten Commandments in every classroom and library—rendering them unavoidable—unconstitutionally pressures students into religious observance, veneration, and adoption of the state’s favored religious scripture. It also sends the harmful and religiously divisive message that students who do not subscribe to the Ten Commandments—or, more precisely, to the specific version of the Ten Commandments that Act 573 requires schools to display—do not belong in their own school community and pressures them to refrain from expressing any faith practices or beliefs that are not aligned with the state’s religious preferences.

Along the way, they have quotations from lawmakers who very clearly voted for this bill because they wanted to foist Christianity on kids:

As one Arkansas legislator proclaimed in defending the school scriptural displays: “I think that anything we can do to try to increase access to or spread that gospel . . . would be something that I would want us to do as a person of faith.”

…

… responding to an Arkansas reverend’s testimony against the proposed law, Act 573 co-sponsor Rep. Stephen Meeks asserted: “You had stated that . . . the Ten Commandments should be taught in church and all that. And I don’t disagree with that. I’m a fellow Christian. But there are a large number of students who don’t go to church. They’re not involved in any religious activities. And so, would you rather them have zero exposure to this or have it in their classroom so they can at least have some exposure?” After the reverend testified that she did not “believe the public schools should be the ones providing that access,” Rep. Jeremy Woolridge proclaimed: “I think that anything we can do to try to increase access to or spread that gospel, I guess, would be something that I would want us to do as a person of faith. I guess I’m a little bit shocked that you, as a pastor, would not have that same view.”

Oops.

The lawsuit also notes that in the Stone case and in Louisiana, the Ten Commandments were required to have a “context statement”—a disclaimer of sorts—alongside the posters, explaining the supposed historical relevance of the Decalogue. They didn’t even bother with that in Arkansas. So if those previous laws were declared illegal, this one is even more egregious.

The fact is that by mandating the Ten Commandments in every classroom, the state is effectively telling kids which religion counts—and which ones don’t. They’re sending a message that kids from non-Christian families (or the “wrong” kind of Christian ones!) are second-class citizens.

The lawsuit says the state is violating the First Amendment’s Establishment and Free Exercise clauses. But because lawsuits take a while to get resolved, the Plaintiffs are asking the judge for a preliminary injunction—to prevent the law from going into effect on August 5 as intended—before the start of the next school year.

While some legal cases depend on how a judge interprets the facts, this one is about as clear-cut as they come. Arkansas passed an illegal law, made up details about American history to defend their position, and practically bragged about their true intentions along the way. Any judge should be able to admit all that while striking down this law before any school has to decide how best to promote Christianity in the classrooms.

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