When Ron Eisenberg learned the Texas Senate had passed a bill requiring every public school to prominently display the Ten Commandments in classrooms, his reaction was immediate.
“I thought, ‘This is nuts,’” said Eisenberg, who is Jewish and who, along with wife Gina, is raising their three school-aged children in that faith. “It reflects the effort of some to force their religion on everybody else. It’s misguided, it’s misdirected and it’s unconstitutional.”
Like Eisenberg, Rabbi Marina Yergin, who serves as associate rabbi at San Antonio’s Temple Beth-El, experienced a jolt at the news.
“I felt physically ill,” said Yergin, who also has a school-aged child. “This makes me so worried for our Jewish students, who are already dealing with antisemitism on an unprecedented level.”
While the Ten Commandments are part of the Jewish religion as well as Christian, Eisenberg and Yergin said they feel that Texas’s overarching emphasis on bringing faith into the classroom primarily benefits Christian students, and can make children of other religions feel less than.
Still to be voted on by the state House, the Ten Commandments bill passed in the Senate on a 17-12 vote.
Yergin is even more worried about another bill the Senate passed, which requires schools to allow time for students and employees to pray and read the Bible or “other religious texts” on each school day.
“This is such a slippery slope,” Yergin said. “The separation of church and state is there for a reason, and it’s just getting trampled on.”
Those doing the trampling include Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who said in a statement that injecting the Ten Commandments and prayer into public schools will ensure that “all Texans have the right to freely express their sincerely held religious beliefs.”
Really? Will that include the Quran for Muslim students? How about the Bhagavad Gita for Hindus? The Book of Shadows for school-aged Wiccans?
Let’s not kid ourselves.
The Ten Commandments bill is just the latest attempt to force religion — specifically, the Christian religion — into the public education sphere in Texas.
An initial incursion happened in 2021, when a Republican state senator wrote a bill that became law which mandates that schools display donated “In God We Trust” signs.
The U.S. Supreme Court greased the wheels for the most recent Texas religious-oriented bills last June, when the court ruled — preposterously — that a high school coach was a “private citizen,” not an employee, when he ostentatiously prayed on the field after football games.
Parent Amber Alwais, whose 10-year-old attends a San Antonio public charter school (charters would also fall under the Ten Commandments dictate), said these sorts of bills “shred the very fabric of what our democracy is.”
“This country was founded on the freedom of religion,” she said. “This is not a Christian nation; we don’t have an official religion. It’s a vocal minority doing this, and their actions are profoundly disrespectful to the men and women who fought and died to protect that freedom.”
Of course, when it comes to laws that negatively impact youth, one could argue that other religiously-infused Texas legislation — such as a bill that would ban transgender kids’ access to life-saving care — poses more harm to children than any Ten Commandments edict.
After all, it’s likely that most students will hardly notice the words on the wall, just as it’s likely few students spend any time deeply pondering the nature of patriotism each morning as they robotically recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
But it’s the point that matters, and the stakes are high. The bill’s proponents insist the country’s founders never intended a separation between church and state — that schools are not “God-free zones.”
Civil rights advocates are understandably outraged at the Ten Commandments bill.
“Parents should be able to decide what religious materials their child should learn, not the [Texas legislature],” the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas said in a statement.
This isn’t the first time that politicians have tried to foist the chiseled list that Moses purportedly brought down from the mountain onto public classrooms.
In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that doing so violated the Constitution’s establishment of religion clause, and banned the posting of the Ten Commandments in schools across the nation.
But in the wake of the Dobbs decision — wherein five Supreme Court justices blithely obliterated legal precedent to overturn the right to abortion — all bets are off on what happens should the bill become law and make it to the highest court in the land.
Which is where all this is destined to end.
The battle to inject God in public schools comes at a time when surveys show a growing number of U.S. adults claim no religious affiliation — the so-called “nones” —while the share of those who identify as Christian, though still the majority, is shrinking.
But what’s most infuriating about the Texas religion-in-the-schools bills is that they turn attention away from what’s really happening in classrooms.
I don’t just mean the movement to ban books in public school libraries — mostly those that address LGBTQ themes — or to control what teachers can teach about the history of racism in this country or other topics not aligned with a conservative worldview.
I’m talking about the move to starve public schools of funding through the so-called Parental Bill of Rights, which would give $8,000 a year to parents to cover the cost of home-schooling or private school, including Christian schools.
Gov. Greg Abbott celebrates this proposal as “education freedom,” but what it really does is fund the teaching of religious doctrine on the public dime. If parents want to strain their children’s learning through a Christian sieve, that’s fine, but I shouldn’t have to pay for it.
Among other sad realities in Texas schools as they exist under Abbott and other Republican lawmakers, who’ve held the reins for decades now and are fully responsible:
- Teacher pay in Texas lags the national average by about $7,500, and the state ranks far behind the national average in per-student funding as well.
- When adjusted for inflation, educational funding has actually decreased throughout Abbott’s tenure.
Some other frightening realities that affect Texas schoolchildren:
In just the past two years, Texas has seen almost a dozen mass shootings. But lawmakers stubbornly refuse to enact gun safety reforms — nay, they’ve eased restrictions, with Abbott as their vocal champion.
This remains true as the one-year anniversary of the massacre at Robb Elementary in Uvalde approaches. It remains true as countless parents wonder each day as they drop their kids off at school — will they be alive by the last bell? And it’s true as generations of children grow up learning active-shooter drills along with writing and arithmetic.
Even as Texans, like most Americans, want stricter gun control laws.
Meanwhile, Texas remains one of the lowest-ranked states in the nation for the wellbeing of children, according to a report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation.
The annual survey examines state data on child health in four areas — economic well-being, education, health and family/community. Texas ranked 45th this year, about the same as recent years. In education, Texas claimed the dubious 33rd spot.
And when it comes to the prevalence of mental illness among youth and their ability to access health care, Texas ranks as among the worst states — 41st — according to Mental Health America, a national nonprofit.
As always, Texas continues to lead the nation in having the highest rate of children who lack health insurance.
The thing is, we know what keeps Texas students happy and well-educated. It’s not 2,000-year-old words on a wall, the long version of which, by the way, equate a man’s wife with his donkey, but that’s a topic for another time … (And, for the record, I sincerely hope words on a wall aren’t the only thing stopping you from committing murder.)
What keeps kids well is this:
Adequately funded public schools staffed by generously supported teachers. Access to affordable health care, including mental health care. Safe communities that are richly imbued with avenues for social connection and positive activities. Parents who can earn a living wage, and who aren’t unencumbered by addiction, domestic violence or mental illness. Children who are loved and accepted for who they are.
But Abbott and his Republican cohorts don’t seem to want us focusing on those things. They seem to want us arguing about the Bible and prayer time and drag shows and public displays of religiosity.
We’re living in the land of Oz, folks, where the political obfuscation is skilled but growing increasingly transparent.
In their quest to religiously indoctrinate Texas students, Abbott and his like-minded colleagues are deploying that hoariest of magician’s tricks: “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!”
