Emily Roth is raising her children without religion. Audrey Rosa Nath is raising hers across four traditions at once: Jainism, Hinduism, Judaism, and Quakerism. Sanjam Kaur Sohal is raising hers Sikh. On paper, the three Houston mothers have little in common.
That all changed last week, when the unlikely trio filed a lawsuit together. The moms, in their suit, are arguing that Texas cannot force a King James Version of the Ten Commandments onto their children's classroom walls. Their kids attend school in three different districts, Houston ISD, Cypress-Fairbanks ISD, and Spring Branch ISD.
Their legal action, filed in Harris County, targets Senate Bill 10, the controversial 2025 law requiring every Texas public school classroom to display a poster of the Ten Commandments measuring at least 16 by 20 inches. It asks a judge to order the posters removed before the school year starts. There isn't much time left – students in the Houston ISD return to class next Monday, August 10th.
Rather than leaning on the First Amendment, though, the mothers are taking the unique tact of suing under two pieces of Texas law: the state's own Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which bars the government from substantially burdening a person's free exercise of religion, and Proposition 15, a voter-approved parental rights amendment guaranteeing parents control over their children's upbringing.
Where Do Parents of Different Faiths Find Common Ground?
The strategy is not incidental. Earlier federal challenges to Senate Bill 10 have already ran their course. Last year, sixteen families and eleven school districts sued, and a district judge agreed the law crossed from exposure into coercion. This spring, however, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that ruling, finding that the mandate to display the posters did not violate the Constitution. The decision cleared the road for a similar law in Louisiana. With the federal route closed for now, these three mothers turned to Texas's own statutes instead.
Emily Roth put the objection in personal terms. "It teaches students, and their teachers, that exclusion is acceptable, maybe even preferred," she said. Her attorney, Megan Hassan, regrets that they even had to take this step when discussing the action the mothers felt compelled to take: “They did not want a legal battle with the state of Texas. They wanted a poster removed from a classroom wall. That should never have required a lawsuit.”
Vanessa D. Gilmore, a former district judge now also representing the mothers, put the underlying complaint more bluntly: the state cannot advance a Christian agenda while excluding every other religious background in Texas. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's office sees the same poster differently. His lawyers argue the Ten Commandments belong in classrooms as part of the nation's heritage, and that a display, unlike a lesson, cannot coerce anyone since students remain free to ignore it.
Even putting aside the newest lawsuit, the defiance is already showing up in districts where the posters have been up since spring. One suburban Dallas teacher has ringed hers with hot-pink placards listing tenets of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam. A Houston-area substitute sends her twin daughters to school wearing First Amendment pins, and gave them extras to hand out to classmates. Further south, a teacher says that if administrators force the issue, she will hang her copy of the poster upside down and take her chances.
The mothers' lawsuit is unfolding alongside a closely watched U.S. Senate race in which Paxton is a candidate. His Democratic opponent, state Rep. James Talarico, has made opposition to laws like Senate Bill 10 part of his campaign, arguing that a mandated Bible verse in every classroom leaves Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, and nonreligious students feeling excluded. A former teacher who has pursued a Master of Divinity at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Talarico frames his opposition in explicitly Christian terms, describing government-imposed religion as Christian nationalism rather than genuine faith.
Why This Matters Across the Faith Spectrum
The objection to displaying the commandments is rarely to rules against murder or theft. These are ethics that nearly every faith tradition already teaches. It is to the commandments that open the list: no other gods before this one, no graven images, no bowing to any other form of the divine. Those lines, critics argue, are not shared moral ground, they form a specific claim about how many gods exist and which one gets worshipped.
That claim sits uneasily beside the very traditions represented in this lawsuit. Hindu and Jain practice is built around many gods or none at all, depending on the school, neither of which the poster's first lines allow room for. Sikhism rejects depicting the divine in any fixed image altogether. A poster that opens with those commandments is not offering universal ethics, it is asking every student in the room to read one tradition's theology as settled fact.
This is not Texas's first pass at putting faith front-and-center in the classroom. The state's Board of Education voted in June to add Bible passages to the required reading list for more than five million students, arriving less than two months before this lawsuit.
ULC covered the original signing of Senate Bill 10 last year, along with the injunction that briefly blocked it. Each round raises the same underlying question in a new form: whether a state can promote one faith's text as shared heritage without asking whose heritage it actually is.
For now, the posters will stay up while a Harris County judge decides.
Should a religious text ever count as secular heritage? Whose version of the Ten Commandments, if any, belong on thoses walls? And does a parental rights law written for one purpose change how you see this fight?
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