NARROWS, Va. — Attorneys challenging a Southwest Virginia county school board’s decision to hang the Ten Commandments in a high school hallway are calling “absurd” the board’s claim that is isn’t responsible for the display, the Roanoke (Va.) Times has reported.
The American Civil Liberties Union and the Freedom from Religion Foundation are representing an unnamed student and parent, who say the school board violated the First Amendment’s prohibition of government endorsement of religion when it voted to permit a copy of the Ten Commandments to be hung near a trophy case in the hall of Narrows (Va.) High School.
The suit was filed last September in U.S. District Court in Roanoke. At the end of November the court will determine if the suit should be dismissed.
Last month, attorneys for the school board asked the court to dismiss the case, saying the display was the work of a private individual and that no school employees assisted in putting it up. But in a brief filed Nov. 1, the ACLU challenged the school board’s attempt to distance itself from the display.
After initially removing the Ten Commandments, the school board voted 3-2 in June to hang it as part of a larger display which included other historical documents.
Rebecca Glenberg, legal director of the Virginia ACLU, told the Bluefield (Va.) Daily Telegraph that the display endorses specific religious values.
“In our filling, we argue, among other things, that courts have consistently found constitutional violations when governments authorize religious displays in public buildings, even when the displays are privately donated,” Glenberg said. “In this case, the school board expressly authorized the Ten Commandments display, and has complete control over whether the Ten Commandments remain in place or are removed. The display hangs in a prominent location in the school, where it represents the views of the school district. This is not merely the speech of a private individual; it is speech that is directly promoted by the school.”
But Matt Staver, founder of the Liberty Counsel, an organization representing the school board, told the Daily Telegraph that a donated display is not unconstitutional and is historically-based.
“Clearly what the school did is accept the private donation. The real question is whether or not this display is constitutional,” Staver said. “What the ACLU wants to run from is that this display has been approved from three federal courts of appeal. These are one level below the Supreme Court. It is a display on law and government. Only one frame is the Ten Commandments and the rest are government documents, so only one-tenth of this display features the Ten Commandments. There is no doubt the Ten Commandments is part of our nation’s founding and is therefore historical in value.”
Though the Supreme Court has never allowed the display of the Ten Commandments in a school, Staver said a case where the Ten Commandments were posted as part of a historical display has never appeared before the nation’s highest court.
That might change, if Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has his way. In an unrelated case, Thomas said Oct. 31 the high court’s basis for decisions in religious display cases was a “shambles,” according to United Press International.
Thomas — one of the court’s most conservative members — issued a dissent in the court’s decision not to hear an appeal from the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals which had ruled unconstitutional a private association’s efforts to memorialize slain police officers with roadside crosses.
“The 10th Circuit's opinion is one of the latest in a long line of ‘religious display’ decisions that, because of this court’s nebulous establishment clause analyses, turn on little more than ‘judicial predilections,’” Thomas wrote in his dissent.
Thomas said he would have granted review of the cases because “our jurisprudence has confounded the lower courts and rendered the constitutionality of displays of religious imagery on government property anyone’s guess.”
Robert Dilday ([email protected]) is managing editor of the Religious Herald.