Senate Passes Ten Commandments Bill

Every Republican in the Texas Senate on Wednesday voted to pass a bill that would mandate the display of the Ten Commandments in all elementary and secondary school classrooms in Texas.

Senate Bill 10, sponsored by Sen. Phil King, R-Weatherford, and every other Senate Republican, would require that public school classrooms place “a durable poster or framed copy” of the Ten Commandments “in a conspicuous place” that will be legible for students anywhere in the room.

Schools would be able to pay for the posters with their own money, but the bill doesn’t increase school funding to cover the cost. They also would be able to accept private donations of the posters.

“Very few documents in the history of Western civilization and even more so in American history have had a larger impact on our moral code and our legal code and just our culture than the Ten Commandments,” King said during floor debate on the bill on Tuesday.

But the bill wouldn’t require teachers to integrate the commandments into their lessons, and it prohibits any supplemental text or annotation to put that in practice, because the posters “must include only the text of the Ten Commandments as provided by Subsection (c).”

That means that any poster providing historical or religious context of the commandments, explaining their more esoteric language for younger students or examining their significance in western civilization would not meet the bill’s requirements. The bill doesn’t describe what penalties schools would face for failing to display the commandments.

Sen. José Menéndez, D-San Antonio, asked how teachers should navigate questions from students about references to “adultery” and “manservants” in the texts.

“Kids are pretty smart, and teachers are exceptionally smart, and I think teachers can help kids work through that,” King replied. “I’ve never met anybody who thought that their kids shouldn’t read every day in the classroom: don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t kill, respect your parents.”

SB 10 also prescribes the specific wording of the commandments that would need to be displayed, taken not from any official translation of the Bible but from a Fraternal Order of Eagles campaign in the 1950s and 1960s, which uses a truncated and modified version of the commandments from the King James Version of the Bible.

That same version of the Ten Commandments is inscribed on a granite monument on the grounds of the Texas Capitol, donated by the Eagles in 1961.

Any other translations or tweaked wording would not meet the requirements set out in SB 10, a criticism brought against lawmakers by a coalition of 166 religious leaders across Texas in a  letter on Wednesday.

“The legislation requires the use of a specific translation of the Ten Commandments — down to individual word choices — that are not remotely universal or inclusive of all faith traditions, even among those of us who incorporate or hold sacred the Ten Commandments,” the letter explained. “Different faith traditions understand and interpret the Ten Commandments differently. In attempting to reconcile and cobble together these varying interpretations, the text of the display mandated by these bills manages to produce a hodgepodge of scripture that includes twelve, not ten, commandments and fails to reflect the beliefs of many Christian and Jewish communities.”

“Indeed, the state-dictated version of the Ten Commandments set forth in these bills does not exist in any translation of the Bible,” the letter continued. “It is simply not possible to create a version of the Ten Commandments that honors every faith tradition’s interpretation, and legislators’ attempt to do so is deeply offensive to those of us who do observe the Ten Commandments.”

The letter more broadly condemned SB 10 as a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment and an excession of its authority.

“The responsibility for religious education belongs to families, houses of worship, and other religious institutions — not the government, the letter stated. “The government oversteps its authority when it dictates an official state-approved version of any religious text.”

King has argued that the policy would not violate the Constitution following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in favor of a high school football coach who was fired after praying on the gridiron. (The Senate Education Committee, on which King serves, invited that football coach, Joe Kennedy, to testify in favor of another bill on March 4, the same day it voted to recommend adoption of SB 10.)

He also has argued that, because the Ten Commandments are recognized in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the bill doesn’t favor a single religion.

Last year, Louisiana adopted a similar law regarding the Ten Commandments (which also mandates the Fraternal Order of Eagles wording), but a federal judge later ruled the policy “unconstitutional on its face” and paused its implementation for schools that sued the state over the law. Louisiana is appealing that decision.

Before the chamber approved SB 10 in second reading on Tuesday, Democrats proposed five amendments to the bill, all of which Republicans voted down.

Sen. Menéndez proposed the first amendment, which would have allowed school districts to require donors of those posters to drop it off at the district’s central administrative office — potentially making the process easier for local school officials, he suggested.

Sen. Sarah Eckhardt, D-Austin, proposed the remaining four amendments, first suggesting changing the text of the Ten Commandments to their full text translated from the Jewish Old Testament and following the practice of writing “G-d” instead of “God.”

“This bill has been framed as promoting Texan and American Judeo-Christian history. It is worth noting that the Jewish community is broadly opposed to this bill including the anti defamation league,” Eckhardt said. “If this is simply about honoring our Judeo-Christian history and not about instilling Christian nationalism in our schools, we should have no issue reverting to the original Jewish translation.”

The Senate voted down her amendment.

Her remaining three amendments proposed requiring the respective display of the Five Pillars of Islam, the Seven Core Tenets of Hinduism and the Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism alongside the Ten Commandments. All three amendments also failed.

The final floor vote on SB 10 was 20-10, with El Paso Democratic Sen. César Blanco absent.