Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Monday directed the vast majority of school districts across his state to follow a law mandating them to display the Ten Commandments, despite a federal judge blocking the measure for nearly a dozen school districts that sued the state.
U.S. District Court Judge Fred Biery ruled last Wednesday that a Texas law set to take effect on Sept. 1 likely violates the Constitution. But despite this ruling, Paxton directed Texas’ Independent School Districts not involved in the ongoing religious freedom lawsuit to follow the law.
“From the beginning, the Ten Commandments have been irrevocably intertwined with America’s legal, moral, and historical heritage,” Paxton wrote in a Monday press release. “The woke radicals seeking to erase our nation’s history will be defeated. I will not back down from defending the virtues and values that built this country.”
The federal judge blocked the law directing school districts to display the Ten Commandments in classrooms due to concerns that the law favored Christianity over other faiths.
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"[T]he displays are likely to pressure the child-Plaintiffs into religious observance, meditation on, veneration, and adoption of the State’s favored religious scripture, and into suppressing expression of their own religious or nonreligious background and beliefs while at school,” Biery wrote in his decision. But despite this determination, he did not issue a statewide injunction blocking the law from going into effect.
Broad injunctions have long been a target of attacks from right wingers. Paxton’s directive comes only months after a Supreme Court decision drastically limited federal courts’ abilities to issue state- or nation-wide injunctions that affect entities not directly involved in the case.
That Supreme Court decision effectively left just two avenues for lower courts to issue broad-based injunctions: Class-action lawsuits and challenges filed by state attorneys general.
Paxton last week criticized Biery’s ruling as “flawed” in a statement to the media and pledged to appeal the judge’s decision. A federal appeals court in June unanimously ruled against a similar challenge in Louisiana.
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