Several families filed a lawsuit against Arkansas school districts on Wednesday over a new law mandating the Ten Commandments be displayed in all public school classrooms and buildings.
Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed the law in April, which is set to take effect in August and applies to all public schools, colleges and buildings that are funded by taxpayer dollars. The parents argue in the suit that the law imposes religion onto children and families, saying it infringes on religious liberties and “substantially interferes with and burdens the right of parents to direct their children’s religious education and upbringing.”
“These children and their families adhere to an array of faiths, and many do not practice any religion at all,” the lawsuit reads. “Nevertheless, because of Arkansas Act 573 of 2025 … all of these students will be forcibly subjected to scriptural dictates, day in and day out.”
“In Arkansas, we do in fact believe that murder is wrong and stealing is bad,” a spokesman for Sanders told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “It is entirely appropriate to display the Ten Commandments – the basis of all Western law and morality – as a reminder to students, state employees, and every Arkansan who enters a government building.”
“Permanently posting the Ten Commandments in every classroom and library—rendering them unavoidable—unconstitutionally pressures students into religious observance, veneration, and adoption of the state’s favored religious scripture,” the lawsuit continues. “It also sends the harmful and religiously divisive message that students who do not subscribe to the Ten Commandments—or, more precisely, to the specific version of the Ten Commandments that Act 573 requires schools to display—do not belong in their own school community and pressures them to refrain from expressing any faith practices or beliefs that are not aligned with the state’s religious preferences.”
Louisiana in 2024 became the first state to implement a Ten Commandments requirement in public school classrooms, though the effort faced similar legal challenges and was later struck down by a federal court. The Texas legislature in May also passed a Ten Commandments measure.
In a previous case, an appeals court ruled that a two-and-a-half ton monument of the Ten Commandments placed in the Alabama State Judicial Building violated the Establishment Clause by making an explicitly religious display “unavoidable.”
“The right to decide which religious beliefs, if any, to follow belongs to families and faith communities, not the government,” John Williams, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas, which represents the plaintiffs in the case, said in a statement. “We will not allow Arkansas politicians to misuse our public schools to impose scripture on children.”
Editor’s note: This piece has been updated with comment from the office of Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
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