More than two dozen Texas families have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down a state law requiring Ten Commandments displays in every public school classroom, a case that could force the justices to revisit a 46-year-old precedent.
The families, representing a range of faiths and school districts, filed a certiorari petition on August 17 challenging two Fifth Circuit rulings that upheld Senate Bill 10, the 2025 Texas law Governor Greg Abbott signed requiring a state-approved version of the Ten Commandments to be posted in classrooms across the state. The petition targets the appeals court's decisions in Nathan v. Alamo Heights ISD and Cribbs Ringer v. Comal ISD, both of which reversed a lower court injunction and cleared the way for enforcement, Forbes reported.
The legal fight turns on whether the Supreme Court's 1980 decision in Stone v. Graham, which struck down a nearly identical Kentucky law, still controls. The Fifth Circuit said it does not. The petitioners say only the Supreme Court itself can make that call.
The Fifth Circuit's April 21 ruling in Nathan v. Alamo Heights ISD came on a razor-thin 9-8 vote, a margin that surprised observers given the court's reputation as the most conservative federal appeals bench in the country. The majority opinion, authored by Judge Kyle Duncan of Louisiana and grounded in originalist reasoning, held that the Supreme Court's 2022 Kennedy v. Bremerton School District decision, which formally discarded the so-called Lemon test for evaluating government entanglement with religion, effectively gutted the foundation of Stone v. Graham.
The Fifth Circuit majority put it bluntly, as Fox News reported:
"[W]ith Lemon extracted, there is nothing left of Stone."
That reasoning drew a sharp dissent. Judge Stephen A. Higginson wrote that Texas was "legislating that specific, politically chosen scripture be installed in every public-school classroom," according to the Associated Press.
The one-vote margin matters. It signals that even among judges appointed largely by Republican presidents, the constitutional question is genuinely contested, and it strengthens the petitioners' argument that the Supreme Court needs to settle the issue rather than leave it to a divided lower court.
The cert petition leans heavily on the argument that S.B. 10 does not merely acknowledge religion in public life, it forces a specific Protestant rendering of the Ten Commandments on children who may hold different beliefs or no belief at all. The petition states:
"A Protestant version of the Ten Commandments is presented as the authoritative set of classroom religious rules to be followed, and it conveys to students who do not adhere to this scripture that the religious beliefs and practices instilled by their parents are incorrect and sinful."
That framing puts the petitioners squarely on the ground the Supreme Court itself has marked out. In Kennedy v. Bremerton, the majority wrote that "religious instruction delivered by public schools, where students are a 'captive audience,' is 'problematically coercive' and implicates a 'foremost' historical hallmark of religious establishment." The families argue that S.B. 10 does exactly what Kennedy warned against, it delivers religious content to children who have no choice but to sit in the room and look at it.
The petition also invokes Justice Samuel Alito's majority opinion in Mahmoud v. Taylor, which rejected the idea that parents who send children to public school must simply absorb whatever instruction the state provides. Alito wrote:
"According to the dissent, parents who send their children to public school must endure any instruction that falls short of direct compulsion or coercion and must try to counteract that teaching at home."
The petitioners argue that Alito's reasoning cuts in their favor, that the state cannot hang a specific denominational text on the wall and tell parents to deal with it at home.
Among the named plaintiffs are Rebekah and Ted Lowe of Austin. As Breitbart reported, the Lowes said, "Texas politicians shouldn't have a seat at the table in deciding how our children receive their religious education."
The legal battle began almost immediately after Abbott signed S.B. 10 in 2025. Parents filed suit, and U.S. District Judge Fred Biery issued a preliminary injunction blocking the law. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton challenged that injunction in the Fifth Circuit, which reversed Biery's order and ruled for the state in both Nathan and Cribbs Ringer.
Paxton celebrated the appellate victory. "This is a major victory for Texas and our moral values," he said after the ruling.
Vice President JD Vance has also weighed in publicly, defending the Texas law as a reflection of Western heritage rather than religious coercion, a framing that tracks with the Fifth Circuit majority's originalist approach.
The petitioners' legal team, which includes Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the ACLU, argues that the Fifth Circuit is "out of line" and "out of step with other lower courts." Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, told Just the News that she takes "a little solace in the fact that, despite its being the most conservative appeals court, the vote was so close, 9-8," but called it "shocking that an appeals court would presume to do what only the Supreme Court itself can do and overturn long-standing precedent."
The case does not exist in a vacuum. Louisiana, Arkansas, and Alabama have adopted or are pursuing similar Ten Commandments display laws, and the Fifth Circuit's ruling gives those measures a strong legal tailwind. If the Supreme Court declines to hear the petition, the Fifth Circuit's reasoning could become the template for religious display statutes across the South and beyond.
The Fifth Circuit itself has become a recurring character in Supreme Court drama. Bloomberg Law has documented that the appeals court has been reversed by the justices more times than any other circuit for three years running, a record that cuts both ways. It suggests the Fifth Circuit is willing to push legal boundaries, but also that the Supreme Court has not been shy about reining it in.
The Supreme Court's docket is already packed with high-stakes cases on guns, immigration, and other culture-war flashpoints. Adding a Ten Commandments case would guarantee another blockbuster term, and another round of intense public debate over the boundary between government and faith.
Other recent petitions have tested that boundary from different angles. Washington state firefighters, for instance, have petitioned the Court over religious accommodation rights, and state courts have begun openly charting their own paths on constitutional questions, signs that the legal landscape around religious liberty is shifting fast at every level of the judiciary.
The core legal question is straightforward even if the answer is not: Does the Supreme Court's decision to scrap the Lemon test automatically erase Stone v. Graham, or does that 1980 precedent survive on its own terms until the justices say otherwise? The Fifth Circuit said Stone is dead. The petitioners say a lower court does not have the authority to make that pronouncement.
Conservative legal thinkers are divided. The originalist analysis in Judge Duncan's opinion has drawn praise from scholars who see it as a rigorous application of the Establishment Clause's original public meaning. National Review's Andrea Picciotti-Bayer described the ruling as "almost certainly bound for the Supreme Court." But the 9-8 split suggests the originalist case is not a slam dunk, even among conservative jurists.
The ACLU and its coalition partners framed the stakes in blunt terms: "The First Amendment safeguards the separation of church and state, and the freedom of families to choose how, when and if to provide their children with religious instruction. This decision tramples those rights."
Whether the justices agree to hear the case remains an open question. The Court has not yet acted on the petition. But the narrow circuit split, the direct conflict with a standing Supreme Court precedent, and the ripple effects across multiple states all point toward the kind of case the justices typically take up.
Parents have every right to raise their children in the faith of their choosing, and the state has no business picking the version of scripture that hangs on a classroom wall. If the Supreme Court wants to settle the question, the petition is sitting on its doorstep.
