Three Texas mothers have filed a state lawsuit against the law requiring Ten Commandments posters in every public school classroom, and they're using the conservatives' own Parental Rights constitutional amendment to do it. Ken Paxton is named as a defendant. The irony is so thick you could hang it on a classroom wall.
What the Law Actually Does
Texas Senate Bill 10, passed by the state legislature last year, requires every public school classroom in the state to display the Ten Commandments. Not as part of a comparative religion curriculum. Not as a historical artifact among many. Just up on the wall, as CBS News reports, full stop.
Texas is now one of four states with this requirement on the books, alongside Louisiana, Alabama, and Arkansas. And nearly a dozen more states are reportedly eyeing similar legislation, including Oklahoma, Georgia, South Carolina, and Indiana. So if you're thinking this is a Texas-only experiment, think again. This is the blueprint.
One federal lawsuit challenging SB-10 already failed in April, when the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the law. Attorneys for the families in that case are expected to petition the Supreme Court within weeks. The legal fight is very much alive, just migrating to different courts.
Meet the Moms Who Are Done Waiting
Audrey Nath, Emily Roth, and Sanjam Sohal, all Houston-area mothers, filed a state lawsuit last week in Harris County District Court. Their argument doesn't rely on federal constitutional law, which the Fifth Circuit just shrugged off. Instead, according to CBS News, they're coming at this from two different angles rooted in Texas law itself.
The lawsuit claims SB-10 violates the 1999 Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which prohibits a government agency from substantially burdening someone's free exercise of religion. Having the state post one religion's core commandments on your kid's classroom wall, the mothers argue, does exactly that.
Then comes the twist. The lawsuit also argues the law violates the Parental Rights constitutional amendment, which Texas voters passed in November 2025, championed by conservatives. That amendment guarantees parents the "fundamental right to exercise care, custody, and control" of their children, explicitly including the right to make decisions about their child's upbringing. The mothers are pointing at that language and asking a very reasonable question: doesn't that apply to us too?
What the Moms Are Actually Saying
Emily Roth told CBS News that her kids are simply too young to be confronted with concepts like murder, adultery, and servitude plastered on their classroom walls without context. That's not a radical position. That's a parent doing the math on what her six-year-old is ready to process.
"This is presenting the beliefs of one religion as rules on the wall," Audrey Nath told CBS News. "And I think that implies that any kids that believe something different aren't following the right thing at school." She's describing, with remarkable restraint, what happens when the state endorses a specific religious tradition in a room full of kids who are legally required to be there.
Roth was blunter about the politics behind this. "I feel like if the state of Texas is going to let Christian nationalists dictate what goes on our kids' walls, they're going to hear from Texas moms," she told CBS News. She also flagged something that doesn't get said enough in coverage of these laws: Texas is being used as a test case. These kids, she said, are the guinea pigs.
The Supporters' Argument, Such As It Is
Ken Paxton's office, named as a defendant in the lawsuit, has not yet responded to CBS News's request for comment. His general position, consistent with his past statements, is that Biblical texts are an important part of the country's heritage and history.
Jonathan Covey, director of policy for Texas Values, a Christian advocacy nonprofit that actually supplies schools with the Ten Commandments posters, pushed back on the parental rights framing. "Parental rights are fundamental, but they're not a license for one family to rewrite that for every child in Texas and what they learn in public schools," he told CBS News.
Set aside for a moment that the state of Texas is literally rewriting what every child in Texas sees in public schools, based on one religion's texts. The argument that individual parents can't object to state-mandated religious displays because that would be imposing their values on everyone else is a remarkable thing to say out loud, apparently without any awareness of what the law itself is doing.
Some Schools Are Already Ignoring the Law
When Texas students head back to school next week, some classrooms still won't have the posters up, and it's not because of rogue teachers. The Arlington Independent School District told CBS News it is waiting for the federal courts to sort out the separate September lawsuit filed by 15 families before it complies.
"While Arlington ISD has received donated copies of the Ten Commandments, schools remain legally prohibited from displaying them while the litigation remains pending in any form," the district said in a statement to CBS News. That's a school district, in Texas, openly saying they got the posters and chose not to hang them because the law is still being contested in court.
That's the situation on the ground: a law passed, upheld by one court, challenged in multiple other courts, with districts splitting on compliance while children file in for the school year. Normal stuff.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to believe that a constitutional amendment guaranteeing parents the fundamental right to control their children's upbringing applies to parents who want religious content in schools but not to parents who don't want it. That is the actual position the defenders of SB-10 are taking. They passed a Parental Rights amendment, ran on it, celebrated it, and are now arguing in court that it only protects the parental rights they already agreed with. The mothers suing over this did not write that amendment. They're just reading it.
What's happening in Texas is not really about the Ten Commandments. It's about whose version of normal gets embedded into public institutions that every child is required to attend. When the state hangs one religion's foundational laws on a classroom wall and calls it heritage, it is making a choice. It is telling Muslim kids, Jewish kids, Hindu kids, atheist kids, and kids whose parents are still figuring all of this out that the default here is not them. The mothers in this lawsuit understand that clearly. The question is whether Texas courts will.
Nearly a dozen states are watching this play out right now, ready to pass their own versions if Texas holds. That's the real stakes. Three moms in Harris County filed a lawsuit last week. Whether it wins or loses, the fact that they're using the state's own conservative constitutional amendment to fight a theocratic mandate is the most Texas thing to happen in years, and it deserves more attention than it's getting.
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