Federal judge delays posting of Ten Commandments in Louisiana public schools

A federal judge blocked Louisiana from posting the Ten Commandments in public schools until November after parents from five districts sued the state over the law.

In a brief ruling Friday, district court judge John deGravelles said that the parents and the state agreed that the Ten Commandments will not be posted in any public school classroom before 15 November. The state also agreed to not “promulgate advice, rules or regulations regarding proper implementation of the challenged statute”.

The state’s Republican governor, Jeff Landry, signed into law last month a bill that requires all classrooms, in K-12 public schools and colleges, to have Ten Commandments posters with “large, easily readable font”. The state is also requiring a four-paragraph “context statement” about how the commandments “were a prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries”.

Soon after the bill was signed, a coalition of parents, supported by the American Civil Liberties Union and other civil rights groups, sued the state saying the bill violates the first amendment.

The bill “unconstitutionally pressures students into religious observance, veneration and adoption of the state’s favored religious scripture”, the lawsuit reads.

The state gave schools a deadline of 1 January to put the posters up and said the deadline had not been affected by the lawsuit.

In a statement , the Louisiana attorney general, Liz Murrill, said that the state agreed not to put up posters until 15 November “because certain legal actions take time … in addition to creating the posters”.

“The compliance date of January 2025 has not changed,” Murrill said.

The bill is meant to give the supreme court a chance to overturn its 1980 ruling that a similar law in Kentucky violated the first amendment’s establishment clause.

In an interview at the Republican national convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, earlier this week, Landry said: “This is one of the cases where the court has it wrong.

“So here is the question: if the supreme court has something wrong, why would you not want that to be corrected? What is the price you would pay to correct that?”

Landry noted that he believes the Ten Commandments will help students’ moral behavior, pointing to Thomas Crooks, the 20-year-old who shot Trump last week.

“I would submit,” he said, “that maybe if the Ten Commandments were hanging on the wall in the school that he was in, maybe he wouldn’t have taken a shot at the [former] president.”