Texas' Ten Commandments in schools law challenged by families and faith leaders in lawsuit
A group of Dallas-area families and faith leaders have filed a lawsuit seeking to block a new Texas law that requires copies of the Ten Commandments be posted in every public school classroom.
The federal lawsuit, filed Tuesday, claims the measure is an unconstitutional violation of the separation of church and state.
Texas is the latest and largest state to attempt a mandate that has run into legal challenges elsewhere. A federal appeals court on Friday blocked a similar law in Louisiana. Some families have sued over Arkansas' law.
The plaintiffs in the Texas lawsuit are a group of Christian and Nation of Islam faith leaders and families. It names the Texas Education Agency, state education Commissioner Mike Morath and three Dallas-area school districts as defendants.
'The government should govern; the Church should minister,' the lawsuit said. 'Anything else is a threat to the soul of both our democracy and our faith.'
Ten Commandments laws are among efforts, mainly in conservative-led states, to insert religion into public schools. Supporters say the Ten Commandments are part of the foundation of the United States' judicial and educational systems and should be displayed.
Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed the Ten Commandments measure into law on June 21. He also has enacted a measure requiring school districts to provide students and staff a daily voluntary period of prayer or time to read a religious text during school hours.
The Texas Education Agency did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.
Abbott, who was Texas attorney general in 2005 when he successfully argued before the U.S. Supreme Court to keep a Ten Commandments monument on the state Capitol grounds, defended the state classrooms law in a social media post on Wednesday.
'Faith and freedom are the foundation of our nation,' Abbott posted on X. 'If anyone sues, we'll win that battle.'
Opponents say the Ten Commandments and prayer measures infringe on others' religious freedom, and more lawsuits are expected. The American Civil Liberties Union, Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the Freedom From Religion Foundation have said they will file lawsuits opposing the Ten Commandments measure.
Under the new law, public schools must post in classrooms a 16-by-20-inch (41-by-51-centimeter) or larger poster or framed copy of a specific English version of the commandments, even though translations and interpretations vary across denominations, faiths and languages and may differ in homes and houses of worship.
The lawsuit notes that Texas has nearly 6 million students in about 9,100 public schools, including thousands of students of faiths that have little or no connection to the Ten Commandments, or may have no faith at all.
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Scotsman
an hour ago
- Scotsman
Readers' Letters: Now we know for sure we can't believe political posts on X
A revelation after Israel's strikes on Iran leaves reader reeling Sign up to our daily newsletter – Regular news stories and round-ups from around Scotland direct to your inbox Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... The revelation that around 6 per cent of messages on X supporting the SNP and attacking England and the English suddenly stopped after an Israeli attack on Iran's communications infrastructure is telling. I was recently commenting on a YouTube video when I realised that the majority of other comments supportive of the separatists had a very familiar ring to them. There was something rather derivative about them. My reaction was to comment that I was probably one of the few real people commenting and that the rest were probably Russian bots. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The news about the Iranian bots shows we must expect at least the same proportion of the pro-separatist comments on such media sites to be from Russian, Chinese and North Korean bots. We know all these hostile forces know that what is bad for the United Kingdom and Scotland is good for them. Scottish independence marchers in Glasgow - not one of them a bot from foreign shores (Picture: Andy Buchanan/AFP) It is something that Scottish nationalists should consider when they wish to make Scotland "independent". The Axis of Evil would like nothing better than for them to achieve their aim. That would weaken one of the main bulwarks upon which the freedoms of the democratic West relies, namely a strong United Kingdom. The freedom of all of us depends upon a strong UK. 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Alastair Neilson, Edinburgh Soft soaping It's useful to think back, at this time, as far back as 1956, when, in the Suez Crisis, the UK realised it was no longer a major power. President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt nationalised the Suez Canal, having failed to get US and international backing for the building of the Aswan Dam. Britain and France colluded secretly with Israel to seize and control the canal, but the military operation was a total failure, and Anthony Eden's government fell. The US and UN had given no backing to the project, and there followed financial crisis and fuel shortages for the UK. The EU and 'coalition of the willing' are in a similar position of weakness in the worthy aim of assisting Ukraine, which explains the fawning sycophancy of Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte in trying to woo Donald Trump back into Nato and backing Ukraine. Never mind also the small matter of having probably not managed to eliminate Iran's nuclear ambitions. Rutte is fully aware that Trump is an unreliable, erratic criminal President bent on destroying democracy in his own country. But he has to try the soft-soaping anyway. Crawford Mackie, Edinburgh Odd question New guidance has been issued after requests from universities for clarity on how they could uphold freedom of speech. Isn't this like the Vatican requesting clarity on how it could uphold Christianity? Doug Clark, Currie, Midlothian Write to The Scotsman Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad
The Herald Scotland
2 hours ago
- The Herald Scotland
There's a parliament for the Central Belt. What about the rest of us?
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New Statesman
2 hours ago
- New Statesman
Why do right-wing 'transvestigators' believe Michelle Obama is a man?
Photo by Charly Triballeau/AFP A new fetish has evolved. For a long time, it was easy to predict the archetypal sexist vitriol spewed by anonymous, vaguely Nordic X accounts whenever a woman came close to the highest seats of political power. But lately, their fascination with female authority has deepened – and twisted. Welcome to the world of the transvestigators: the West is falling, family values are under attack, and Michelle Obama is secretly a man. The objective of this conspiracy among far-right internet sleuths is to use phrenology to 'prove' that cisgender celebrities – namely the wives of political figures – are secretly transgender (or 'inverted,' as they are typically referred to). These detectives scrutinise the physical features of these women – from their height and voices to their jaws or 'energy'– in search of supposed deviations from arbitrary beauty standards. While it began with posts about the former First Lady and Angela Merkel, transvestigation has now proliferated throughout the online far-right ecosystem, where each new day brings another avalanche of outlandish claims and AI transvestigation sludge. The most recent swell came when Meghan Markle shared footage – in her uber-cheery, classically cringey Instagram mode – of herself and Prince Harry dancing in a hospital. The choreography in the video was allegedly a labour-inducing ritual and, also allegedly, a successful one: Rachel from Suits and the Spare made the post to celebrate four years since Lilibet's birth. The far-right saw through all that: 'At first, I didn't buy into the rumours', an X post began. But 'there's no denying this: Meghan Markle is a fraud'. Markle's great swindle? Trying to convince the world that she gave birth to her children. Anyone with two eyes and a lot of free time could see the truth. That was no baby bump – that's a scrunched-up 'puffer jacket,' a balled-up 'blanket,' or, as one user astutely proposed, a rumpled 'hotel sheet.' The ruse confirmed what they had always known: Prince Harry had married a woman who was unwilling to carry her own child, so insisted on having Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet via surrogate. Transvestigation is part of a broader 'emasculation fetish' within the online right. That sense of emasculation was formed by the twin pressures of two perceived threats: the woke left's crusade against traditional masculine values and an influx of 'fast-breeding alien immigrants'. The persecuted and surrounded envisioned a new image of virtue – then stuck it in the White House. This new model was the fertile patriarch: Donald Trump. He was Christian (sort of), nationalist, strong, with a perfect (mute) Mar-a-Lago-faced wife and a legion of grinning, preferably white, children. J.D. Vance said, 'I want more babies in the United States of America'. In an essay explaining his conversion to Catholicism, Vance remembered 'the achievement that mattered most to me for so much of my life: a happy, thriving family.' With the new pride came a new fall. The most disgraceful shame, now, was to lose control over your woman and her womb. And with the emergence of transgenderism, 'cuck' (from cuckold), the old insult, metastasised into a still more fearful peril for dominated husbands. Your wife could secretly be a man. Thus a new ignominy was mapped out, where the children weren't children, the wives weren't wives and, above all, the men weren't men. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe It was only a week before the Markle video that the world had stopped to watch Emmanuel Macron pushed in the face by his wife, Brigitte, as they deplaned during a state visit to Vietnam. Here was a head of state reduced to a trembling 'man-child' – emasculated and humiliated by a wife who groomed him as his teacher. X and Reddit filled with AI memes of a black-eyed, arm-slung Macron cowering beside his wife. But in 2025, scenes that we once might have called 'unfortunate' now supply more complex implications. Right-wing talking-head Candace Owens was willing to stake her considerable professional reputation on this one. Owens told listeners of her multi-part series Becoming Brigitte to 'stop everything': she had unravelled 'likely the biggest scandal that has ever happened in politics in human history'. The French president's wife was a man. This she was a he, the femme was a homme, and there were prehistoric, grainy zoom-ins on Brigitte's crotch to prove it. In this world, few passions are more dearly cherished than the transvestigation. Even while interviewing Renaud Camus, the originator of the 'Great Replacement' theory, the key online right guru Curtis Yarvin could not resist questions about Brigitte's sex. A baffled Camus protested, 'We are dealing with the most important thing in the history of the Continent,' referring to the rise of nonwhite immigration to Europe. 'What does it matter if Mrs. Macron is a man or a woman?' But to some, it very much does matter. And the 'Brigitte = Jean-Michel' hypothesis has but a fraction of the traction of 'Michelle = Michael'. This is the idea that Michelle Obama, whose husband has long been a hate figure for the American right, is Michael LaVaughn Robinson. It's absurd, sometimes even laughable. But emasculating non-compliant figures like Prince Harry, Macron and Obama – while deploying the triumvirate of far-right insults: racism, sexism, and transphobia against their wives – has generated an almost guaranteed formula for viral outrage, meme fodder, and reinforcement of reactionary gender norms. It's a wider endorsement of traditional general roles that promote the restriction of women to domestic roles, while offline, a broad backlash against feminism has led to legislative changes that reduce women's bodily autonomy. Most irritating, if not most serious, is the unavoidable suspicion that all this noise has rather more to do with the accusers than the accused. Seeing anonymous crotch-zoomers lamenting the downfall of Western civilisation on X, I remember Christopher Hitchens: 'Whenever I hear some bigmouth in Washington or the Christian heartland banging on about the evils of sodomy or whatever, I mentally enter his name in my notebook and contentedly set my watch. Sooner, rather than later, he will be discovered down on his weary and well-worn knees in some dreary motel or latrine, with an expired Visa card, having tried to pay well over the odds to be peed on.' As it happens, a 2022 lawsuit unearthed a Republican enthusiasm for transgender porn. Texas, Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, and Kansas – five valiant defenders of Bible, bullet and boot – came out on top of the charts. The new beau idéal of the right-wing family is a familiar one. In fact, the idea beneath it is very nearly a cliché: that behind every successful man is, well, another man. [See also: Is Thomas Skinner the future of the right?] Related
