Is ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ Too Offensive for Texas Schools?
A U.S. District Court judge recently issued an injunction on the 10 Commandments bill in the state of Texas. Senate Bill 10, which passed the Texas legislature this past session in 2025, requires schools in Texas to display the 10 Commandments. The displays must be privately funded and provided. This injunction is the second one since August, when another U.S. District Court judge issued the first injunction. This most recent injunction names an additional eleven school districts in the suit.
Before discussing the specifics, we should understand how an injunction actually works. In simple terms, it is a court order that pauses a law, action, or policy while the underlying legal challenge moves forward. Judges issue them when they believe there could be serious harm if the disputed action continues unchecked, or when the case raises significant constitutional questions that deserve full consideration before anything takes effect.
Unlike the first injunction, the second and most recent one rests the case on an alleged violation of the Establishment Clause in the First Amendment. Frankly, this is one of the most absurd cases to close out 2025. It is extraordinarily difficult to identify any legal path for this injunction to survive. Here’s why.
In 2022, Kennedy v. Bremerton restored religious liberty to its original constitutional footing. The Court struck down the Lemon Test (from Lemon v. Kurtzman), which had blocked even the faintest hint of religious establishment connected to the state. Under Lemon, the standard became so distorted and so hostile to religious expression that practices long accepted throughout American history were suddenly treated as constitutional violations.
Kennedy rightly ended that.
In the Kennedy decision, justices such as Kavanaugh and Alito grounded their reasoning in “history and tradition”—the actual foundation of American law. In essence, they asked:
“What did the Founding Fathers believe about this issue?”
Rather than leaning on decades of judicial overreach, the Court returned to the wisdom embedded in our national heritage. Proverbs 22:28 puts it plainly: “Do not move the ancient boundary which your fathers have set.”
The judge who issued this injunction seems to have completely ignored the Kennedy precedent. For Liberty & Justice sees no legal avenue for this injunction to stand, not even a close one, based on Kennedy alone.
But that is only the beginning. Texas’s duly elected legislature—the House and Senate—passed SB 10, and the governor signed it. Not only has the state spoken, but the Supreme Court has already given its blessing to laws in this category. Confidence grows even stronger considering that these displays of the 10 Commandments are privately funded, not paid for with tax dollars.
This leads to the real question: What exactly is so offensive about the 10 Commandments?
There is nothing even remotely objectionable, to any rational mind, about “thou shalt not murder,” or “thou shalt not bear false witness.”
These are the very moral foundations that any healthy society depends on.
For most of American history, religion and education were inseparable. Churches often doubled as schoolhouses. As early as 1647, the Puritans enacted the Old Deluder Satan Act, requiring towns to establish and fund grammar schools. Their logic was simple: if citizens could not read, they could not read Scripture, and would be far more vulnerable to deception, bondage, and the loss of liberty, both spiritual and civil.
Education is not a secular invention. It originates with God, who commanded in Deuteronomy 6:7, “You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up.”
Pretending education is some neutral sphere that must remain “unbiased” is one of the greatest deceptions ever forced on the American public. If schools were truly neutral, classrooms would not be plastered with pride flags. And the very fact that Democrats spend hundreds of millions of dollars on local school board races proves just how much the godless political left values the ideological battlefield of education.
This issue goes far beyond Texas—it is a national problem—one that has permeated every state to some extent. If Texas, being the conservative example for the nation, is struggling to maintain the most basic morals in public schools, what does that mean for other states?
God cares deeply about children. We have a sacred obligation to teach them His statutes. Education belongs to Him. He created it. And it is the responsibility of the Church to steward it faithfully.