Civil liberties groups vow lawsuit over 10 Commandments/classroom law

Not long after Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry signed a law requiring public school classrooms to display the Bible's Ten Commandments, civil liberties groups announced they will soon be filing suit to overturn the law.

The American Civil Liberties Union, the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and the Freedom from Religion Foundation say the law is a blatant violation of the First Amendment's establishment clause, which prohibits the government from endorsing a religion.

In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a similar Kentucky law in Stone v. Graham .

Until Landry signed the law Wednesday, no other state requires the Ten Commandments be displayed in public schools.

"Posting of religious texts on the wall serves no...educational function," the majority wrote in Stone v. Graham . "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. However desirable this might be as a matter of private devotion, it is not a permissible state objective under the Establishment Clause of the Constitution."