The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Americans for Separation of Church and State, and the national and state offices of the American Civil Liberties Union. The plaintiffs include nine Louisiana families of different faiths, including four members of clergy.
At an afternoon press conference, some human rights groups said the case was of national importance.
“Louisiana, and the nation, is at a tipping point. This is a reckoning that’s been going on since the civil rights movement. We are in the midst of the civil rights movement of our generation. This is a choice we make, and it’s about whether we move toward light and hope and freedom or whether we choose to live in darkness and foster despair,” said Alana Odoms, executive director of the state’s ACLU, who called the legislation, called HB 71, “the canary in the coal mine.”
The groups, which work to protect the separation of church and state, said last week they would challenge the law, which Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed on Wednesday, the first such law in the nation since the Supreme Court ruled a similar Kentucky law unconstitutional in 1980.
State Attorney General Liz Murray said Monday she hadn’t seen the lawsuit but pointed to a pending U.S. Supreme Court case in which the state of Louisiana is accusing the Biden administration of censoring conservative voices, and the January conviction of six abortion opponents who blocked an abortion clinic in Tennessee. In the former case, the administration said it only requested the removal of misinformation.
““The ACLU seems to only selectively care about the First Amendment. They don’t care if the Biden administration censors speech or arrests pro-life protesters, but apparently they’ll fight to block posters that discuss our own legal history,” she said.
Last week, he appeared on a conservative cable channel. Murrill, the Newsmax reporter, noted that the law requires Bibles to be posted with “context” that describes the Ten Commandments as “a vital part of American public education for nearly three centuries.” He said, “The effort to add context is like our Congress trying to thread a needle. … This has not been done yet, but I certainly intend to provide legislative guidance to our school system.”
Heather Weaver, an attorney for religion and religious freedom at the ACLU, said no circumstances exist that would justify a permanent, prominent version of the Ten Commandments derived from a specific Protestant document, as required by law.
“What’s particularly egregious is that they’re posting it in every classroom and trying to draw students’ attention to it in a way that is clearly very problematic,” she said during the meeting Monday afternoon. “There’s no reason to do that. It doesn’t tie into any academic lesson.”
Under the new law, schools must display the Ten Commandments in “a poster or framed document measuring at least 11 inches by 14 inches” in every classroom by Jan. 1. The commandments must be “centered” on the display and “printed in a large, easily legible font,” the law states.
The Rev. Jeff Sims, a Presbyterian pastor and plaintiff in the lawsuit and father of three Louisiana public school students, called the law a “gross government intrusion into private religious belief.”
“I want my children to understand the Bible in the context of our faith, which teaches that God respects diversity and that all people are equal. This law violates and tramples on my religious freedom,” he said. “In this country, separation of church and state is in place to prevent exactly this kind of abuse of government power. As a pastor and a father, I cannot stand by and watch as political representatives usurp God’s authority.”
Lawyers for civil rights groups said Monday they were confident the legal side would lose if the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“For many years [Supreme Court rulings] “These coercive practices against children are extremely concerning,” said Patrick Elliott, legal director at the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
Since the law was passed, experts on church-state separation law have pointed out that the legal standard used in the 1980 case has been invalidated by the current conservative court in 2022. The so-called Lemon test, which has been in place for more than 50 years to determine whether a law violates the First Amendment’s separation of church and state clause, asks whether the government is “unduly” involved in religion, or whether a particular law harms or promotes religion, and has never remained neutral.
The Supreme Court has indicated it will consider history, tradition and constitutional provisions in 2022.
“Right now we’re in some ways uncharted territory,” Michael Helfand, a professor of religion and ethics at Pepperdine University School of Law, said last week about what Louisiana’s law might look like.
