Three parents sued on Thursday to force Texas to block and remove posters with the Ten Commandments from public school classrooms, arguing that state laws on religious freedom and parental rights conflict with the new state-mandated displays.
The lawsuit, filed in state court in Harris County, seeks a court order to remove the displays and prohibit their posting before students return. The school year begins in early- to mid-August for many Texas districts.
The suit filed on Thursday is trying a different approach.
Instead of making an argument about the separation of church and state, the plaintiffs are relying on a Texas law, passed in 1999 and signed by Gov. George W. Bush, that protects religious practice.
The law, known as the Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act, has been invoked in many previous Texas cases, often by religious groups or people arguing that some action by the state government interferes with their religious practice.
Posting the commandments in classrooms “substantially interferes with plaintiffs’ free exercise of religion, religious development, and rights to raise their children free of State-sponsored religion,” the suit says.
The suit also invokes a state constitutional amendment, passed by the Republican-dominated legislature and adopted by voters last year, that guarantees parents the right to direct their children’s upbringing.
“I never intended to talk to my children this young about the Ten Commandments,” said one of the plaintiffs, Emily Roth, whose children, 4 and 6, attend the Spring Branch Independent School District and whose household is nonreligious. “It’s not the set of moral absolutes that our family is run on.”
The state has defended the displays as elemental to instruction about U.S. history, rather than religion.
“The Ten Commandments have had a profound impact on our nation, and it’s important that students learn from them every single day,” Attorney General Ken Paxton, whose office defended the displays in federal court, said in a statement after the appeals court victory.
Since last fall, Texas schools have been required by state law to post in every elementary and secondary school classroom a Protestant version of the Ten Commandments drawn from the King James Bible. The same version appears on a monument outside of the Texas Capitol.
But because the federal court case was pending at the time, some school districts, including in the Houston area, did not display them during the last school year.
The plaintiffs in the most recent suit are three mothers of children in different Houston area school districts — Ms. Roth, Sanjam Kaur Sohal, who is Sikh, and Audrey Rosa Nath. Ms. Nath is raising her children with a combination of family traditions, including Jainism, Hinduism, Judaism and Quakerism.
They argue in the suit that displays of the Ten Commandments in public schools compel their children to see religious messages that conflict with their families’ religious instruction.
Steven T. Collis, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin and an expert in law and religion, said that the parents could make the argument that “the new law is a form of religious compulsion and that it forces parents to perform acts at odds with the fundamental tenets of their religious beliefs.”
Whether they would prevail in state court is an open question, he added. Most previous challenges to displays of the Ten Commandments have focused on the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, which prohibits the government from establishing religion.
“It is not a traditional First Amendment argument at all,” said William Demond, one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers, of the new challenge.