In Texas, It's the Context, Stupid!

 

Reading about the 5th Circuit's decision in the Texas 10 Commandments case, sent me into reveries about my own experience with religion in Texas public school classrooms. 

ME AND MY SHADOW

I was a student in Texas public schools from 1st grade through high school graduation -- the 1950s through the election of John F. Kennedy. Of course I was indoctrinated. In grade school, first thing of a morning we had Bible readings and prayers blasted into every classroom over a speaker system -- pious little moments to start the school day. They were probably majority Southern Baptist in hue and flavor, if I were betting, but at least pointedly Protestant, not that theology meant squat to me at that age. The Bible readings and prayers -- "devotionals," they were called -- were meant to make us "mindful," quiet and observant, tamed for classroom decorum by Protestant doctrines of sin and punishment. I'm sure those devotionals were tactical for teachers and administrators, who probably preferred their children guilt-ridden and docile.

Though I learned the 10 Commandments at church, not at school, I'll be honest here and say out loud that I don't think the display of the 10 Commandments in every classroom of my upbringing would have hurt me. Actually reading them now could start a lot of arguments, or at least a lot of wide-ranging thought, like when did "Remember the Sabbath day" become "Your butt better be in a pew on Sunday"? The Protestant text of the commandments -- which is actually quoted in the 5th Circuit majority's opinion -- gets me asking all sorts of questions -- like, did the original author of the Commandments -- looking at you, Jesus -- know nothing about human nature? To outlaw coveting things your neighbor has, including his wife and his slaves, guaranteed a pretty universal participation in sin, don't you think? And I have other questions about just exactly what "land" God has given us -- or who is the "thee" he gave it to if not us? And what does honoring father and mother have to do with keeping that land? 

I concur with the 5th Circuit majority in the need to review the actual text: 

I AM the LORD thy God.

Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven images.

Thou shalt not take the Name of the Lord thy God in vain.

Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.

Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land
which the Lord thy God giveth thee.

Thou shalt not kill.

Thou shalt not commit adultery.

Thou shalt not steal.

Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house.

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his
maidservant, nor his cattle, nor anything that is thy neighbor's.

The Commandments are a somewhat quaint, historically resonant, very culturally specific document that every kid should know, but having it forced on kids' -- and their parents, not to mention teachers unwilling to be conduits of partisan thought-control -- by state legislators and Ken Paxton, whose motives have little to do with education but a great dealt to do with the winds of conservative orthodoxy and the wielding of power -- that is the context that made SB 10 a threat. 

  

BACKGROUND TO THE LAWSUIT

1. Gov. Greg Abbott signed Texas SB 10 into law in 2025, which mandated the "conspicuous" display of the Protestant 10 Commandments in each and every Texas classroom, from 1st grade to 12th, with "a typeface visible from anywhere in the room." The posters were mandated to be at least 16 inches wide and 20 inches tall. Schools were not required to purchase the posters. They were ordered to accept donations of them. (And if that doesn't sound like a bag job of ulterior motives, I don't know what would!) SB 10 was part of a much broader conservative push since God put Trump in the White House as 2nd Son to censor library books, clamp down on "deviance," and "infuse Christianity into public schools."

2. Some 15 parents of school-age children in certain Texas school districts became the plaintiffs in an ACLU challenge to SB 10, and the parents won in two different Federal District courts, which first halted the law in the specific 15 school districts represented by the plaintiffs and then enjoined it statewide, ruling it was likely, on the face of it, that SB 10 violated the "establishment of religion" clause in the US Constitution. 

3. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, that scourge of God who appears to have been behind much of the push for the 10 Commandments law, appealed to the 5th Circuit in January, and the 17 active judges on the Circuit heard the case en banc. They decided 9-8 that the Texas law is not coercive because it does not require students to learn the Ten Commandments nor does it give teachers authority to undermine students’ religious beliefs. 

But the best reading in the 118-page 5th District ruling are the several dissents appended by the eight judges who know a stinkbug when they see one.