The New Ten Commandments Lawsuit Runs on Laws Christians Wrote. That Is the Whole Point.
Three mothers from the Houston area walked into a Harris County courthouse at the end of July and asked a judge to take the Ten Commandments off their children’s classroom walls before school starts in mid August. One of them is raising her children without religion. One is raising hers across the traditions of her own family: Jain, Hindu, Jewish, Quaker. One is Sikh.
None of that is the interesting part. Ten Commandments suits are practically a Texas tradition by now. Sixteen families sued last summer under the First Amendment; a federal judge blocked the law in their districts; and this spring the Fifth Circuit reversed course and let Senate Bill 10 stand, clearing the way for Louisiana’s version too. The federal road, for now, is closed.
So these three mothers did not take the federal road. They sued under two Texas laws instead. The first is the Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1999, which says a government agency may not substantially burden a person’s free exercise of religion. The second is Proposition 15, the Parental Rights Amendment, which Texans added to their constitution just last November, guaranteeing parents the right to direct their child’s upbringing.
Read those two laws again and ask who championed them, who campaigned for them, who cheered when they passed. Then you will understand why this case matters more than the poster does.
