Court clears way for Louisiana law requiring Ten Commandments in classrooms
Source: ABC News/AP
February 20, 2026, 7:48 PM
A U.S. appeals court has cleared the way for a Louisiana law requiring poster-sized displays of the Ten Commandments in public classrooms to take effect. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals voted 12-6 to lift a block that a lower court first placed on the law in 2024. In the opinion released Friday, the court said it was too early to make a judgment call on the constitutionality of the law.
That’s partly because it’s not yet clear how prominently schools may display the religious text, if teachers will refer to the Ten Commandments during classes, or if other things like the Mayflower Compact or Declaration of Independence will also be displayed, the majority opinion said.
Without those sorts of details, the panel decided it didn’t have enough information to weigh any First Amendment issues that might arise from the law. In other words, there aren’t enough facts available to “permit judicial judgment rather than speculation,” the majority wrote in the opinion.
But the six judges who voted against the decision wrote a series of dissents, some arguing that the case was ripe for judicial review and others saying that the law exposes children to government-endorsed religion in a place they are required to be, presenting a clear constitutional burden. Circuit Judge James L. Dennis wrote that the law "is precisely the kind of establishment the Framers anticipated and sought to prevent.”
Read more: https://abcnews.com/US/wireStory/court-clears-louisiana-law-requiring-ten-commandments-classrooms-130353175
Link to ORDER (PDF) - https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/znpnmdkaevl/02202026ten.pdf
Off to the SCOTUS... again.
= new reply since forum marked as read
And, they will be all in... right up to the point where someone tries to put up a Satantic Church poster, or a Confucianism poster, or anything other than Christian imagery. Then, watch the backpedaling.
Here is a story about this very thing. It happened a while back. I laugh very loudly every time I read it. Talk about throwing it back in their faces!
By Jonathan Serrie
Published January 18, 2012
WEAVERVILLE, N.C. A pagan mother's challenge to the distribution of donated Bibles at a local school has prompted the Buncombe County Board of Education to reevaluate its policies regarding religious texts.
Ginger Strivelli, who practices Witchcraft, a form of Paganism, said she was upset when her 12-year-old son came home from North Windy Ridge intermediate school with a Bible.
The Gideons International had delivered several boxes of the sacred books to the school office. The staff allowed interested students to stop by and pick them up.
"Schools should not be giving out one religion's materials and not others," Strivelli said.
According to Strivelli, the principal assured her the school would make available religious texts donated by any group. But when Strivelli showed up at the school with pagan spell books, she was turned away.
"Buncombe County School officials are currently reviewing relevant policies and practices with school board attorneys," the district announced in a written statement. "During this review period, no school in the system will be accepting donations of materials that could be viewed as advocating a particular religion or belief."
The school board is expected to address the issue at its next meeting Feb. 2. According to legal experts, the First Amendment gives public schools two clear choices when it comes to the distribution of religious texts.
"You can either open your public school up to all religious material, or you can say no religious material," Michael Broyde, a professor and senior fellow at Emory University's Center for the Study of Law and Religion said. "You can't say, 'You can distribute religious material, but only from the good mainstream faiths.'"
Preventing government from favoring or restricting any one religion may have helped the U.S. avoid the bloodshed experienced in some other Western nations, such as Germany and Ireland, according to Broyde.
"America runs a grand, noble experiment in religious diversity without violence," he said. "There's no killing of the Jews. There's no Catholic-Protestant violence. We are very successful in this grand experiment."
Traditionally, that "grand experiment" has involved Judaism and a handful of Christian denominations. But as non-traditional faiths spread into new communities, longstanding customs such as prayer, Christmas plays and Bibles that once went unquestioned in public schools are finding themselves under increased scrutiny.
"Our country was founded on Judeo-Christian principles, not on Wiccan principles," Bobby Honeycutt, who attended public schools in Weaverville during the 1970s, said.
"Our children have access to more non-Christian print material in the libraries and online than they really do Christian stuff," he said.
While many Weaverville Christians see recent events as a threat to tradition, others see a purpose in enforcing church-state separation in public schools, because even the nation's traditional faiths have divisions.
"Many Christians have stood up and said they agree with me too," Strivelli said. "Because, as much as they may like the Bible, they don't want Jehovah's Witnesses coming in with Watch Tower (magazines) or Catholics coming in and having them pray the Rosary."
Thank you Jonathan Serrie for the article. By the way, you cannot find it these days. Funny, that.
