When history teacher Chris Dier sued Louisiana two years ago for mandating that the Ten Commandments be displayed in classrooms, he said it was not about taking a stand against Christianity.
“It’s a defense of many different types of values, including civil liberties and religious freedoms,” Dier said, who teaches at a New Orleans high school. “I spent over 16 years teaching students that the constitution protects everyone of every faith – students of no faith too.”
While Dier’s lawsuit has stalled, posters of the sacred text have appeared in schools across the state. Dier said he would not hang up a copy even if one is dropped off at his door, and he is willing to accept the consequences.
“I want people to know there are teachers out there who want to demonstrate that we can take a stand,” he said. “We don’t have to let schools become battlegrounds.”
Louisiana is among four states (including Texas, Arkansas and Alabama) that have recently enacted laws requiring the Ten Commandments to be posted in all public school classrooms, from kindergarten to college. A host of other southern states, including West Virginia, Mississippi and South Carolina, are debating similar legislation.
The laws, which raise thorny questions about the separation of church and state, are gaining renewed attention as the supreme court is expected to consider a number of challenges to them, including Dier’s, in the fall. Public school teachers caught in the crosshairs of the escalating culture war are fighting back, some taking the legal route and others quietly defying the law in their own classes. At least two teachers in Texas, theater teacher Gigi Cervantes and band director Johnnie Cotton, have quit in protest.
“I believe very strongly that politics and religion have no place in the public schools,” Cotton said in a Facebook post announcing his resignation. “I spent my 42 years as a teacher and administrator making sure that my classroom/campus stayed neutral on both counts.”
‘It is Christian nationalist bullying’
Taria Usher, a kindergarten teacher in a district near Houston, said she was furious when copies of the Ten Commandments were delivered to her school in late May. By law, she is obliged to display one in her class.
“I’m personally Christian, but professionally, a secular teacher,” Usher said. “Publicly funded classrooms are not the place for religious tenets to be put up.”
Rather than simply complying with the mandate, Usher ordered posters with different religious teachings – the Five Pillars of Islam, the Five Precepts of Buddhism and the Yamas and Niyamas of yoga – and hung them around the Ten Commandments. Then she launched a petition demanding that the school board join in the ACLU’s lawsuit against the state or allow teachers to take down the posters without any backlash. Usher read out the demands at a school board meeting this month.
“For me, it is Christian nationalist bullying,” she said about the state mandate. “I am going to fight against it.”
Other groups and opponents of the law have organized resources for teachers, including the website IllegalPoster.com, which offers free LGBTQ-themed posters of the Ten Commandments, as well as companion posters explaining why the mandate is unconstitutional.
The Texas law requires that the commandments be displayed in a “conspicuous place” on posters of at least 16 by 20 inches in size, and the text has to be easily read by anyone with “average vision”. One stipulation: schools are not required to buy the posters with district funds, but they must accept donated copies. That hasn’t stopped some districts in Texas from spending thousands of dollars to print their own posters. Well-funded Christian groups have also been raising money to buy and send copies of the Ten Commandments to schools.
Texas’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, and other proponents of the law have argued that the Ten Commandments are “irrevocably intertwined with America’s legal, moral and historical heritage”. It’s a perspective that Usher said she “unequivocally” rejects.
“As an African American woman, American heritage has been oppression and slavery,” she said. “I see a push in certain ways that some people in this country want to go back to those things. The last thing I see is people obeying the Ten Commandments.”
Fight could head to the supreme court
Daniel Mach, the director of the ACLU Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief, said the Ten Commandments policies are part of a broader movement by the Christian right to inject religion in public schools, including efforts to install chaplains on campus and create religious charter schools.
“There are plenty of people who want to take a wrecking ball to the wall separating religion and government,” he said.
But there’s a nearly half-century-old supreme court precedent protecting this wall, Mach said. In a 1980 ruling, the court ruled that a similar Kentucky law violated first amendment rights, which bars the government from establishing or favoring a religion.
“The court then said what we’re arguing now, which is that these laws violate the important constitutional protection that we have against government religious favoritism,” he said.
Many parents are also fighting back, joining forces with the ACLU and other legal groups to file a flurry of lawsuits against the mandates. After seven Arkansas families with children in public school sued the state last year over its Ten Commandments mandate, a federal judge struck down the law in March, arguing that “nothing could possibly justify hanging the Ten Commandments – with or without historical context – in a calculus, chemistry, French or woodworking class, to name a few”. (The state has said it intends to appeal the ruling.)
In Texas, two dozen families from multi-faith backgrounds asked the supreme court last month to take up their challenge against the state law – after the US fifth circuit court of appeals ruled against them. The supreme court is expected to consider two challenges to the Texas law this fall.
The Rev Mara Richards Bim, a Dallas-based Baptist pastor and parent who is part of the Texas litigation, said the law violates the “separation of church and state” principle that is integral to her faith.
“As a Baptist, I am opposed to the state imposing their version of faith in classrooms,” Bim said. “Scripture and faith traditions are best taught at homes and in church.”
Two other plaintiffs, Ted and Rebekah Lowe, are raising their children in a Christian and Jewish family. They said they don’t oppose the teachings themselves but felt that the government has no right to privilege one religion over any other.
“When it comes to religious instruction like the Ten Commandments, it’s my job as a parent to teach it,” Ted Lowe said. “I don’t want government officials inserting themselves into our children’s religious education.”
