Background: Senate Bill 51 would require the display of the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom in South Dakota. Each public school must also include, as part of the school’s history and civics curriculum, instruction on the Ten Commandments.
Our position: The ACLU of South Dakota opposes Senate Bill 51.
The First Amendment guarantees families and faith communities — not politicians or the government — the right to instill religious beliefs in their children. Displaying the Ten Commandments in our state’s classrooms blatantly violates this promise.
Students can’t focus on learning if they don’t feel safe and welcome in their school. Senate Bill 51, if passed, will cause students who don’t follow the state’s approved religious dictates to feel ostracized from their school community, and it will undermine their ability to learn and the state’s legal obligation to provide an equal education to all students, regardless of their faith.
Students already have the right to engage in religious exercise and expression at school under current law. Students may, for example, voluntarily pray, read religious literature or engage in other religious activities during recess or lunch. The ACLU has long worked to protect the religious exercise and religious expression rights of students of all faiths in public schools.
But there’s a stark difference between voluntary, student-initiated religious exercise and school-sponsored promotion of religion. Court precedent confirms this.
Nearly 50 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court said in Stone v. Graham that “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.”
South Dakota’s public schools are for education, not religious conversion.
