Federal appellate court rejects Louisiana’s Ten Commandments display law

NEW ORLEANS — A federal appeals court blocked a Louisiana law Friday that requires public K-12 schools, colleges and universities to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom.

The 5th U.S. Court of Appeals, often cited as one of the most conservative courts in the nation, found the law unconstitutional because it violates the establishment clause of the First Amendment, which bars the government from endorsing a religion or creating laws that favor one religion over another.

The 52-page ruling, made unanimously by a three-judge panel, upholds a lower court’s injunction that blocked the law from taking effect in five of Louisiana’s K-12 school districts after families with students in those districts sued the state last year. The injunction applies only to the districts where those plaintiffs live. Read the ruling below.

The legal battle began in June 2024 when Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed into law House Bill 71 of the 2024 Regular Session, sponsored by Rep. Dodie Horton, R-Haughton. The law requires all public schools in Louisiana to display in every classroom an 11-inch by 14-inch poster bearing a Protestant Christian version of the Ten Commandments.

That same month, a group of nine families with children who attend public schools across five parishes — East Baton Rouge, Livingston, Orleans, St. Tammany and Vernon — filed the lawsuit with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union and the advocacy group Americans United for Separation of Church and State. 

The plaintiffs subscribe to a range of religious and non-religious beliefs and include Catholics, Presbyterians, Jews, Unitarians and others who argued that the Protestant version of the Ten Commandments the Legislature adopted differs from the versions they follow.  

U.S. District Judge John deGravelles, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, presided over the lower court proceedings in Louisiana’s Middle District Court in Baton Rouge. He issued an injunction that kept the law from taking effect in the plaintiffs’ five parishes.

Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, one of the groups that represented plaintiffs in the case, said Friday’s ruling ensures Louisiana families — not politicians or public school leaders — maintain control of their children’s religious choices. 

“It should send a strong message to Christian Nationalists across the country that they cannot impose their beliefs on our nation’s public-school children. Not on our watch,” Laser said in a statement.

Judge Irma Castillo Ramirez, who former President Joe Biden appointed to the federal appellate court, wrote the opinion issued Friday. Judges James Dennis, a Bill Clinton appointee, and Catharina Haynes, who George W. Bush chose for the court, affirmed the decision.

“Under the statute’s minimum requirements, the [Ten Commandments] posters must be indiscriminately displayed in every public school classroom in Louisiana regardless of class subject-matter,” and thus, if allowed to go up, “those displays will cause an ‘irreparable’ deprivation of [the Plaintiffs’] First Amendment rights,” Ramirez wrote.

Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, a Republican, said she “strongly disagrees” with Friday’s ruling. She intends to seek a review from the full 5th Circuit and, if necessary, turn to the U.S. Supreme Court.

While many see the law only for its provisions requiring classroom Ten Commandments displays, its other and perhaps more significant purpose, as evidenced in the first two pages of the law itself, is to try to establish an official record that ties the origins of U.S. law to a Protestant Christian doctrine. If the state ultimately succeeds in the case, Louisiana law could help rewrite a national historical record built upon the separation of church and state.

When it became apparent last year the new law would wind up in court, Landry was asked about its impact on students who are not of Judeo-Christian faith. He said they shouldn’t look at the posters.

“I think we’ve forgotten in this country that democracy actually means majority rule,” Landry said at the time. 

The governor had also suggested that Thomas Crooks, the man who attempted to assassinate President Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, last July, might not have carried out his attack had the Ten Commandments been displayed in his classroom as a child.

One of the state’s primary arguments is that the Ten Commandments is part of long-standing tradition and history in America and that the doctrine is similar to the Magna Carta and other historical accords, but the appellate panel found nothing to support this claim. 

The judges pointed to testimony in the lower court hearings that revealed the bill lawmakers passed last year was rife with historical myths and fabricated quotations found on various websites and social media posts that purport to link the Ten Commandments to the nation’s founding fathers. 

None of America’s founding documents — such as the U.S. Constitution, Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights — make any mention of the Ten Commandments. The same holds true for the Magna Carta, Mayflower Compact and Northwest Ordinance, all referenced in House Bill 71, according to historian and religious studies professor Steven Green, who testified for the plaintiffs in the case.

The appellate court pointed out that the state offered no rebuttal to Green’s testimony. 

“Based on Dr. Green’s testimony, the district court found a substantial likelihood that there is insufficient evidence of a broader tradition in place at the time of the founding, or within the history of public education, so as to justify H.B. 71,” the judges wrote.

The state also argued the display of posters had a secular educational objective to teach students about the nation’s foundational documents. However, the appeals court found that to be a “sham” insincere objective, pointing to arguments Horton made when her bill was debated on the House floor last year.

When another lawmaker asked her how a Buddhist or Muslim student might interpret one of the commandments, Horton responded, “Well I’m not Buddhist or Muslim so I’m not really worried about defining it for them. . . . [The Ten Commandments] [are] a model for what’s God — it’s God’s law, and it’s universal law.”

The court noted that another lawmaker painted opposition to the bill as an “attack on Christianity.”

The judges found those statements supported a commonsense conclusion that the purported secular purposes for the bill were implausible and inadequate.

Because the ruling only addresses deGravelles’ preliminary injunction, overall arguments in the lawsuit are still playing out in court and will eventually go before the entire 5th Circuit and, likely, the Supreme Court. 

In a 1980 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a similar law in Kentucky.