On August 25 a history teacher in New Orleans asked the Supreme Court to take his case.

His name is Christopher Dier. He teaches at Benjamin Franklin High School and he was Louisiana's Teacher of the Year in 2020. WWNO, reading his petition, reports that he was raised a devout Catholic, attended a Baptist university, and does not disagree with the Ten Commandments; what he objects to is the state endorsing them. He will not hang the state's chosen version on his classroom wall, he says, even if that costs him the job.

Every other person suing over one of these laws is a parent or a student. WWNO reports that Dier is the only teacher to have challenged this law or the ones like it in other states, and that his attorneys wrote in the filings that he "supplies the perspective missing from every other case."

The law he is fighting is currently in effect. Not stayed. Not blocked. Up on Louisiana classroom walls, right now.

And if you read a headline this week saying several states have passed Ten Commandments laws, you were handed a sentence that is wrong in four separate directions.

The Receipt

There is no such thing as "the Ten Commandments law." There are four of them, in four different legal positions, which means the honest answer to is it in effect where I live depends on which state line you are standing behind.

StateLawWhere it stands right now
LouisianaH.B. 71 / La. R.S. 17:2124In force. The en banc Fifth Circuit threw out the injunction on ripeness, expressly not on the merits
TexasS.B. 10Upheld on the merits, 9 to 8, and now at the Supreme Court on a joint cert petition
ArkansasAct 573Permanently struck down in March. On appeal to the Eighth Circuit
TennesseeH.B. 47Permissive. Local boards may choose, in common areas, and the statute does not reach classrooms

Take them one at a time, because the differences are the whole story.

Louisiana is in force, and it got there sideways. On February 20, 2026, the Fifth Circuit sitting en banc issued a 12 to 6 per curiam decision in Roake v. Brumley that vacated the preliminary injunction blocking H.B. 71. It did not hold the law constitutional. It held the challenge unripe, which is a way of saying come back when the posters are actually up and you can show us what happened. The Fifth Circuit's own later opinion describes it in one flat sentence: "We have since dismissed the Louisiana case as unripe." The practical effect is that a law nobody has ruled lawful is hanging on walls while the paperwork catches up. Louisiana has its own conditional cross-petition pending at the Supreme Court, docket 25-1360, filed May 21, 2026, with a response due September 28.

Texas got the opposite treatment from the same court. On April 21, 2026, the same en banc Fifth Circuit upheld Texas S.B. 10 on the merits, 9 to 8, in an opinion by Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan. The majority's move was to declare that Stone v. Graham, the 1980 Supreme Court case striking down a nearly identical Kentucky poster law, is no longer good law because it rested on a test the Court has since abandoned. Two concurrences, four separate dissents, one vote apart. That ruling is what the ACLU, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Americans United and Simpson Thacher took to the Supreme Court in August.

Arkansas is the one that lost. On March 16, 2026, Chief Judge Timothy L. Brooks of the Western District of Arkansas permanently enjoined Act 573 in Stinson v. Fayetteville School District No. 1. The sentence is worth reading as he wrote it: "Act 573 must be permanently enjoined. Failing to do so would violate the Establishment Clause rights of all Arkansas public-school children and their parents and also violate Plaintiffs' Free Exercise rights." Arkansas has appealed, and the Eighth Circuit now has it.

Tennessee is the one everybody gets wrong. H.B. 47 is permissive. The text says local boards "may allow" schools to display the Ten Commandments along with a menu of other documents, and it defines the only permitted spot as a "prominent location," which the statute itself defines as "a school entryway, cafeteria, or common area where students are likely to see the display." Classrooms are not on that list. So when Washington County's school board voted unanimously to put displays in all fifteen of its schools, that was a local board making a local choice inside a permission slip, which is a different animal from a state ordering every teacher in every room. Both things are worth arguing about. They are not the same thing.

Alabama makes five, and it is a fifth posture again: S.B. 99 was enacted this year, takes effect October 1, 2026, and its display requirement does not begin until January 1, 2027, and even then only "subject to the availability of donated funds or donated displays."

Why It Costs You

Now the argument that decides these cases. It is a fact about the text, and you can check it yourself in about ten minutes.

There is no single agreed list. The joint cert petition in the Texas case puts it plainly, citing the trial record: "Many Catholics, Jews, and other Protestants number, organize, or translate the Ten Commandments differently." The differences are not cosmetic. Many Jewish readings treat God bringing the Israelites out of Egypt as a load-bearing part of the Commandments, and the state-selected Texas text drops it. That text says "Thou shalt not kill," where the verse most Jews follow prohibits murder, which is a different rule. Most Catholic renderings, when shortened, do not carry the "graven images" language at all, because that phrasing sits badly next to the veneration of icons.

I did twelve years of Catholic school. In the numbering I was taught, the graven-images line is not its own commandment, it lives inside the first, and coveting gets split into two to get you back to ten. That is not a technicality. It is a different list.

So when a state picks one wording and mandates it, the state has not posted a neutral historical artifact. It has picked a denomination. Judge Brooks said so in the Arkansas order in the language of a court: Act 573 is "denominationally preferential." He also dealt with Arkansas's claim that its text was "specifically crafted" to be non-sectarian, and he did not take it gently. That claim, he wrote, "is misleading at best. The text was not 'crafted' at all; members of the Legislature did not sit down with interested religious groups to broker an egalitarian textual compromise." The legislature picked that wording because it was the wording on a monument the Supreme Court had already blessed in a different setting.

That is who pays. A Catholic kid gets a Protestant list. A Jewish kid gets a Christian translation of her own scripture. And a Baptist teacher, or a Catholic one like Dier, gets told by the state which version of the text is the official one.

How the Machine Actually Works

Three moving parts, and none of them is about theology.

One: a precedent got hollowed out instead of overruled. Stone v. Graham has said since 1980 that posting the Commandments in every classroom violates the Establishment Clause. The Supreme Court has never overruled it. What it did in 2022, in Kennedy v. Bremerton, was discard the Lemon test that Stone leaned on. The Fifth Circuit majority read that as permission to treat Stone as dead. Judge Brooks read the same cases and came out the other way: Stone "has not been explicitly overturned and is binding upon all lower courts." Same law, two answers, and the one you live under depends on your zip code.

Two: ripeness is doing work that looks procedural and isn't. A court that says "too early" without saying "lawful" lets the posters go up anyway. Louisiana's are up, and a ruling that decided nothing about the merits is what put them there.

Three: follow the poster. Texas requires schools to accept and post compliant donated displays. Alabama's mandate is expressly conditioned on donated funds or donated displays. Arkansas's own record showed something worth sitting with: the state conceded there is no educational use for the posters at all. As Judge Brooks summarized it, "the State admits there is no educational purpose in displaying the Ten Commandments, no teaching, no learning, and no curricular integration." A mandate with no lesson attached, paid for by outside donors, hung in a room children are legally required to sit in. That is not a curriculum. That is signage, and somebody else is buying it.

The posters are the visible end of a much longer project.

The Strongest Version of the Other Side

The Fifth Circuit majority has an answer to the translation argument, and it is not a stupid one. Courts, it says, have no business refereeing scripture: "Not being a court of ministers, bishops, or rabbis, we have no business opining on these matters and no competence to do so." And it pushes further, asking whether a rule against denominational favoritism would eventually require scrubbing every religious reference out of public life, right down to city names like Corpus Christi and St. Augustine.

Take it seriously, then answer it. Nobody is asking a judge to decide whose Decalogue is correct. The argument runs the other way. Because no court can settle it, no legislature should be assigning it. A city keeps its name because somebody named it three hundred years ago. A poster goes up in a fifth-grade classroom because a legislature voted this year to put it there, in one wording and not another. Those are not the same act, and the state chose the second one on purpose.

What You Can Actually Do

The lever this month is closer to your house than Washington, and closer than your statehouse.

In Tennessee it is your school board, because H.B. 47 hands the decision to them and to nobody else. In Alabama the requirement runs on donated displays, which means somebody in your district is about to decide whether to accept a donation. Both of those are local votes with public agendas, and both are winnable in a room with twelve people in it.

The assignment takes one email. Find your district's next board agenda and search it for "Ten Commandments" or "historical documents." If it is on there, go, and ask the board one question with a checkable answer: Which translation are we posting, and who chose it? Not whether. Which. That question has no comfortable answer, because there isn't a neutral one, and asking it out loud in public is how a permission slip stops being automatic.

Christopher Dier is a Catholic-raised history teacher who, on the reporting, does not disagree with the Commandments and still won't post the state's edition of them. He can hold both of those at once. So can your school board, if somebody asks it to.

Come back for the rest

We do this every week. The holy-sounding framing on top, the mechanism underneath, every claim traced back to the filing it came from so you can go check it yourself. Pour something cold, pull up a chair, and let us send you the receipts before the next round of nonsense clears your feed. Subscribe to The Long Pour. The free newsletter where the week's little robberies and the one big one land in your inbox together.

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The Receipts

Every claim above traces to a source you can open yourself.