Stone v. Graham Has Been the Law Since 1980. On Monday, Two Dozen Texas Families Asked the Supreme Court Whether Anyone Still Means It.

Strip the case to its principle and it is not complicated. A state may teach the Ten Commandments. A state may not require every child in every classroom to sit underneath the state's chosen version of them for thirteen years.

The Supreme Court said something very close to that in 1980, in Stone v. Graham, when it struck down a Kentucky law requiring the Ten Commandments to be posted in every public school classroom. Stone has never been overruled. It is still sitting in the reports.

On Monday, August 17, more than two dozen Texas families filed a joint petition for certiorari asking the Court to say so out loud.

They are not who you would guess.

What was filed, and by whom

The petition covers two cases at once, Nathan v. Alamo Heights Independent School District and Cribbs Ringer v. Comal Independent School District. The families behind it have children in roughly twenty two school districts across Texas. They are Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Baha'i, Unitarian Universalist and nonreligious, and they are represented by the ACLU of Texas, the national ACLU, Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, with Simpson Thacher and Bartlett acting without fee.

The statute is Texas Senate Bill 10, passed in 2025. It requires every public school in the state to permanently display the Ten Commandments in a conspicuous place in every classroom, from kindergarten through twelfth grade, in a version the legislature itself selected, drawn from the Protestant King James Bible.

Read that sentence twice, because the fight lives inside it. The state did not require a display of the Ten Commandments. The state required a display of one particular rendering of the Ten Commandments, and the legislature picked which one. Jewish, Catholic and Protestant traditions number and word the commandments differently. Texas chose.

In April, the en banc Fifth Circuit ruled that SB 10 violates neither the Establishment Clause nor the Free Exercise Clause, and cleared the way for the posters to go up in the plaintiffs' classrooms. The vote was narrow.

The two questions, and why the second one matters more

The petition asks the Court to decide whether laws like SB 10 violate the Establishment Clause. That is the argument everyone expects.

The second question is the one to watch. It asks whether the law violates parents' rights under the Free Exercise Clause to direct the religious upbringing of their children, and it leans on Mahmoud v. Taylor, decided in 2025, which held that parents may opt their children out of certain instructional material on religious grounds.

Mahmoud was a win for religious parents. It is now being pointed at a Ten Commandments mandate, by parents who include Christians, on the ground that the state has taken a decision out of their hands that belongs to them.

That is not a gotcha. That is how a real liberty works. A right that only ever runs one direction is not a right, it is a preference with a lawyer.

The petition also quotes Texas legislators who said in the open that they wanted students to "know about God" and to be introduced to "eternity with God." Then it draws the consequence: left standing, that reasoning could let government officials flood public school classrooms with an endless array of religious rules, instructions and mandates.

The fair point on the other side

Here is the strongest version of the state's case, and it deserves stating properly rather than in a form that is easy to knock over.

The Decalogue is not a foreign object in an American courtroom. It is genuinely woven through the history of Anglo American law, it appears carved in public buildings across the country, and a state that says so is not making a confession of faith. Stone itself was decided under an establishment clause framework that the Court has spent the last decade moving away from in favour of history and tradition. The Fifth Circuit did not have to pretend Stone said something other than what it says. It could reason, and did, that the ground underneath Stone has shifted.

That is a serious argument. It is also precisely why this petition matters. If the ground has shifted that far, somebody should say so from the bench rather than leaving a 1980 precedent formally alive and functionally dead. Lower courts should not have to guess which Supreme Court decisions are still load bearing.

Why this is not only a Texas problem

Since 2021, some eighty two bills touching the Ten Commandments in schools have been proposed or passed across twenty six states, according to an analysis by the Education Commission of the States. Nine reached a governor's desk. Eight were signed. One, in Arizona, was vetoed. Four states now require the displays: Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, and Alabama, whose law takes effect in January.

So the question in front of the Court is not what happens on one wall in San Antonio. It is what rule applies in every classroom in every state that has passed one of these, and in every state that is about to.

The pluralist cost, stated plainly

If you are a Christian parent in Texas and this law delights you, run the same rule through a legislature that is not yours.

A state that may compel the Protestant King James text in Alamo Heights may compel some other body's chosen text somewhere else, and your child will be the one sitting under it. The Free Exercise argument in this petition is the argument you will want available on that day. You cannot pick it up then if you spent this week saying it does not count.

What happens next, and what you can do

Nothing, for a while. The Court denies the large majority of cert petitions, and it can deny this one without a word of explanation. The respondents will file a brief in opposition, and the case will go to conference when the justices return. There is a real chance this dies quietly and the posters stay up.

Read the petition yourself rather than the coverage of it. It is public. Then, if you have children in a district that has put the displays up, find out which version your district was told to post, and by whom, and on what authority. That question is not hostile. It is the question a citizen is supposed to be able to ask about anything a government hangs on a wall in front of a child.

If this is the kind of reading you want in front of you before the term starts, subscribing is what keeps it coming.

Sources

ACLU, "Texas Families Urge U.S. Supreme Court to Take Case on Texas Law Requiring Ten Commandments in Public School Classrooms," August 17, 2026, and the joint petition linked from it
Naaz Modan, "Ten Commandments law appealed to Supreme Court," K-12 Dive, August 17, 2026
ACLU of Texas, "Legal Challenges to Texas' Ten Commandments Law, SB 10"