Religious freedom is one of our country’s most treasured liberties. Every individual and family — not politicians or the government — gets to decide for themselves what religious beliefs, if any, they adopt and practice.
This constitutional protection is strongest in our public schools, which serve children and families of many religious backgrounds. As the U.S. Supreme Court has observed, “families entrust public schools with the education of their children, but condition their trust on the understanding that the classroom will not purposely be used to advance religious views that may conflict with the private beliefs of the student and his or her family.”
Unfortunately, the government sometimes strays from these ideals. We’re seeing that in South Dakota with Senate Bill 51, legislation that would require the Ten Commandments to be posted in all public-school classrooms. This measure blatantly violates the First Amendment’s promise of religious freedom.
The Ten Commandments are fundamentally religious edicts. Indeed, Senate Bill 51 mandates the specific text that must be used in each display, and the very first words proclaim, “I AM the LORD your God” and direct students to “have no other gods before me.”
More specifically, the U.S. Supreme Court has noted that the commandments are “undeniably a sacred text in the Jewish and Christian faiths.” Nearly 50 years ago in Stone v. Graham, the court struck down a Kentucky law that required public schools to post the Ten Commandments in every classroom, explaining: “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.”
Given this longstanding Supreme Court precedent, it’s not surprising that a federal court held in November that a 2024 Louisiana law, which is similar to Senate Bill 51, is unconstitutional. After hearing extensive expert testimony, the court rejected Louisiana’s false claim — one repeated in Senate Bill 51 — that the Ten Commandments “were a prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries.” Pointing the Supreme Court’s ruling in Stone and the heightened constitutional protections for religious freedom in public schools, the court found that the Louisiana statute violates both students’ and parents’ First Amendment religious-freedom rights.
Requiring South Dakota school districts to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom will put school boards in an impossible situation by requiring them to infringe the constitutional rights of students and parents and risk being sued by any number of families, along with all the associated costs of such litigation.
Parents’ and students’ objections to school promotion of this scripture is not rooted in hostility to religion. In Stone, for example, the plaintiffs were Quaker, Unitarian, and a rabbi, among others. In the recent Louisiana case, the plaintiffs include public-school parents who are Christian ministers in addition to parents of interfaith families, Jewish families and others. Additionally, many Christian, Jewish, and other minority-faith groups have spoken out against proposals like Senate Bill 51. These families and faith-based organizations all seek to defend the same enduring religious-freedom principles: the government cannot take sides on matters of faith, and our public schools belong to all and should be welcoming of all, regardless of religion.
Only by upholding these principles can we ensure that the freedom of religion remains a cornerstone of our democracy.
A version of this column also appeared in The Dakota Scout.
