Texas has become the center of a heated national debate after a new Republican-backed law, Senate Bill 10, went into effect requiring public schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom. Supporters say the measure restores a moral foundation that has long been absent from public education, while opponents argue it violates the principle of separation of church and state. Some teachers have quietly resisted the mandate—hanging the poster upside down, surrounding it with other religious tenets, or refusing to display it altogether—while lawsuits from parents and activist groups continue to move through federal courts. Attorney General Ken Paxton has reminded schools not tied to litigation that they must comply, though enforcement currently remains unclear.
What critics fail to admit is that the Ten Commandments are more than a religious text—they are the basis for our legal and cultural order. Prohibitions against murder, theft, and bearing false witness underpin our criminal laws; honoring parents and respecting property are cornerstones of civil society. Students are not harmed by being reminded of timeless moral truths—they are harmed when society strips those truths away and leaves them to navigate life without a compass. Far from being unconstitutional, posting the Ten Commandments is a necessary reminder that freedom depends on virtue, and virtue requires standards higher than the whims of the moment.
The controversy surrounding Texas’ new law requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms reveals just how far our nation has drifted from its moral foundation. Critics insist the mandate represents a breach of the so-called “separation of church and state,” but that objection ignores a simple fact: the Ten Commandments are not merely religious edicts—they are the bedrock of Western civilization and secular law itself.
Consider the principles they lay down. Do not murder, do not steal, do not bear false witness, honor your parents—these are not sectarian doctrines, they are moral imperatives that every society requires to function. Our criminal codes and civil statutes flow directly from these timeless commands. Without them, the very concepts of justice, property rights, family integrity, and personal responsibility collapse. To call them “unconstitutional” is to deny the very foundation of the Constitution itself, which was written by men who recognized the necessity of a moral order rooted in divine law.
It is absurd to suggest that exposing children to the Ten Commandments threatens their freedom. No one is forced to join a church or profess a creed by seeing a simple poster on the wall. Rather, they are reminded that life is governed by objective standards of right and wrong—standards older and higher than the modern fringe philosophies that have yet to prove any sustainable moral virtues.
The real danger is not in posting the Ten Commandments but in banishing them. A classroom stripped of moral reference points does not become “neutral”—it becomes hollow. And into that vacuum rush relativism, nihilism, and the cultural decay we see playing out across our cities and campuses today.
Texas lawmakers are right: children deserve to know the moral inheritance that shaped their country. Far from violating the First Amendment, displaying the Ten Commandments affirms the truth that freedom is only sustainable when bound by virtue. Excluding them from classrooms is not neutrality—it is amnesia, and a deliberate effort to sever the next generation from the roots of ordered liberty.
