Louisiana is already facing legal action over its new law requiring every public classroom to display the Ten Commandments, as fresh debate is unfolding about whether displaying the religious text violates the Constitution. 

The law requires schools that receive state funding — including public and nonpublic universities and colleges, as well as non-public K-12 schools that accept public funding — to display signs with “large, easily readable font” of the Ten Commandments in each classroom and in each building of the schools. 

Several groups including the American Civil Liberties Union announced on Wednesday that they are preparing a lawsuit over the legislation on the basis that it would result in “unconstitutional religious coercion of students, who are legally required to attend school and are thus a captive audience for school-sponsored religious messages.” 

“The law violates the separation of church and state and is blatantly unconstitutional,” the groups wrote. “The First Amendment promises that we all get to decide for ourselves what religious beliefs, if any, to hold and practice, without pressure from the government.” 

Other groups, including the First Liberty Institute, are praising the law and are pushing for similar ones in other states. 

“The Pelican State has rightly recognized the history and tradition of the Ten Commandments in the state,” the First Liberty Institute’s Of Counsel, Matt Krause, who testified in support of a similar Ohio bill, said. “Putting this historic document on schoolhouse walls is a great way to remind students of the foundations of American and Louisiana law.”

The law’s legislative sponsor, state Representative Dodie Horton, also successfully pushed a law requiring “In God We Trust” to be written and displayed in the state’s public classrooms. She says the Ten Commandments offer historical context for Louisiana’s laws, as the Sun reported. Yet critics, including state Senator Royce Duplessis, say the inevitable lawsuits will lead to a waste of “valuable state resources” over cases that the state will “likely lose in court.” 

The Supreme Court in Stone v. Graham in 1980 held that displaying the Ten Commandments in schoolrooms was “plainly religious in nature.”

“The Ten Commandments are undeniably a sacred text in the Jewish and Christian faiths,” the court noted, adding that the Commandments “do not confine themselves to arguably secular matters.” 

The court said posting religious commandments on the walls was different than teaching them in curriculum for history, religion, or similar subjects. 

“Posting of religious texts on the wall serves no such educational function. If the posted copies of the Ten Commandments are to have any effect at all, it will be to induce the schoolchildren to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate and obey, the Commandments,” the court wrote. “However desirable this might be as a matter of private devotion, it is not a permissible state objective under the Establishment Clause.” 

Yet, recent Supreme Court decisions have taken a less strict stance on the Establishment Clause, sparking religious freedom debates across the country including over the legality of a Catholic charter school in Oklahoma. 

For its part, Louisiana’s leadership appears hungry for a constitutional debate.

“I’m going home to sign a bill that places the Ten Commandments in public classrooms,” Governor Landry said at a fundraising event last weekend, ahead of the bill becoming law. “And I can’t wait to be sued.”