1. United States
2. Texas
3. Letter

I am writing to urge you to oppose SB 10 and similar bills that mandate that the Ten Commandments be prominently displayed in public elementary and secondary school classrooms in Texas. This bill blatantly violates the First Amendment’s establishment clause prohibiting any state-sponsored or state-endorsed religion. It violates the religious liberty of non-Christian and religiously unaffiliated Texans, who number eleven million, which is more than the population of many US states.  Under the guise of “religious freedom”, this bill in fact would serve to impose one particular religion’s teachings in public schools if it were to be enacted. It’s a thinly-veiled instrument of Christian supremacy and it violates any reasonable definition of freedom of conscience. The Constitution grants each of us the right to choose any religion, or no religion, according to our own values and beliefs. There’s no place in public education for the imposition of a particular set of religious teachings on students who may be part of a different faith tradition.  Defenders of these bills often invoke “history and tradition” as a justification for requiring the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. But as noted above, there are millions of Texans who come from different religious or philosophical traditions. We should remember that the “history and tradition” of Texas did not include a single Christian for thousands of years and that today many Texans are Sikh, Muslim, Hindu, or secular, among other non-Judeo-Christian belief systems.  It’s ironic that many of the legislators who write and support bills like this claim to fiercely support parental rights over their children’s education. Well, what about the right of Muslim or Hindu parents to insist that their children’s public schools not impose a religion on their children that is alien to how they want to raise them? What these legislators seem to really mean by “parental freedom” in education is the right of Christian parents to opt their children out of curricula that they deem offensive with no commensurate rights for non-Christian parents.  Imagine how these same Christian parents would feel if their child’s public school were required to display excerpts from the Quran or the Hindu Vedas in classrooms. Most religions, Christianity included, teach empathy towards other people’s perspectives. Let’s employ a little of that empathy and reject bills like SB 10 which are little more than tools of religious oppression.