Attorneys with the First Liberty Institute (FLI) are promising to keep fighting until schools in all 50 states can display the Ten Commandments despite a federal judge’s ruling Wednesday in San Antonio blocking at least temporarily the new law that requires the biblical classic to be seen on all Lone Star State public campuses.

“We are extremely disappointed federal courts continue to defy Supreme Court precedent by striking down constitutional statutes that require the posting of the Ten Commandments in schools. The Ten Commandments are part of the history and tradition of our country and have the protection of the First Amendment. We will continue to fight until these cases are resolved and the Ten Commandments are posted in schools throughout the nation,” said FLI Of Counsel Matt Krause.

The Supreme Court in a 2005 ruling in the case of Van Orden v. Perry ruled a Ten Commandments display on the Texas State Capitol grounds is constitutional.

But in a 55-page ruling that culminated in two sentences ordering that Texas schools be “PRELIMINARILY ENJOINED from displaying the Ten Commandments,” as required by the Texas statute, Federal District Court Judge Fred Biery prefaced his decision with a story about how he was told earlier in his career on the bench by a Methodist preacher that “Fred, if you had been born in Tibet, you would be a Buddhist.”

Biery was appointed by then-President Bill Clinton in 1993 and was sworn in to the federal bench in 1994.

The motion seeking the preliminary injunction was sought by Jewish Rabbi Mara Nathan, Pastor James Griffin Martin, Reverend Cynthia Mood, and 18 others, while 11 Texas public school districts were defendants opposing the motion to block the law, including the Austin Independent School District, the Houston Independent School District and the Plano Independent School District. The latter is a large Dallas suburban city.

Among the multiple harms the plaintiffs claimed would result if the Ten Commandments are allowed to be displayed in Texas public schools, the first such harm was “that they will suffer personal spiritual offense as a result of the posting of the Ten Commandments.”

In addition, the plaintiffs asserted they will suffer additional harms, including “usurping their parental authority to direct their children’s religious upbringing and education,” a message sent to their children that “they do not belong in their own school community,” pressuring their children “to observe, meditate on, venerate, and follow the State’s favored religious text,” and “suppress expression of their own religious beliefs and backgrounds at school.”

In his lengthy decision, Biery offered a version of constitutional law favored by liberal scholars in which the First Amendment’s guarantees of religious freedom of expression and practice are understood to ban any official expression or activity that links the state to a church or spiritual movement.

In fact, the major proponents of what became the First Amendment were conservative North Carolina and Virginia Baptists who feared government would establish one official denomination and require all citizens regardless of their personal views on religion to contribute tax revenues to support state-approved religion.

The Baptist Faith and Message of the Southern Baptist Convention explains the issue, saying “Baptists continue to emphasize that neither church nor state should exercise authority over the other, to stress that the church should not depend on the finances or power of the state to carry out its mission, and to point to history’s record that a free church in a free state proves a blessing to both.”

That separation did not include, according to the three authors of The Federalist Papers, barring official expressions of encouragement of practice of the moral values of Christianity, particularly as embodied in the Ten Commandments.

James Madison, recognized as the “Father of the Constitution” who would later serve as the nation’s fourth president, declared that “the belief in a God who is all-powerful, wise and good is so essential to the moral order of the world and to the happiness of man that arguments which enforce it cannot be drawn from too many sources.”

Similarly, Alexander Hamilton, who would serve as the nation’s first secretary of the Treasury under President George Washington, declared of the importance of Christianity “how clearly it is proved by this that the praise of a civilized world is justly due to Christianity — war, by the influence of the humaine principles of that religion, has been stripped of half of its horror. The French renounce Christianity, and they relapse into barbarism — war resumes the same hideous and savage form which it wore in the ages of Gothic and Roman violence.”

John Jay, the third author who would become the first Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, wrote that “the Bible is the best of all books, for it is the Word of God and teaches us the way to be happy in this world and in the next. Continue therefore to read it and to regulate your life by its precepts.”

Judge Biery concluded his opinion’s analysis by offering Texas legislators an alternative approach to the public display of the Ten Commandments in the state’s public schools.

“Notwithstanding the sausage-making process of legislation, to avoid religious rancor and legal wrangling, the Texas Legislature alternatively could require the posting of:

“1. Multiple versions of lessons of behavior from many cultures melded into the American motto of ‘E pluribus unum,’ a concept currently in decline. For example, the Five Moral Precepts of Buddhism: Abstain from killing, stealing, engaging in sexual misconduct, lying and intoxicants; or

“2. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Be kind. Be respectful.; or

“3. All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten: ‘Share everything. Play Fair. Don’t hit people . . . Clean up your own mess. Don’t take things that aren’t yours. Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody . . . Live a balanced life . . . When you go out into the world, . . . hold hands, and stick together.’”

Judge Biery could not be reached to determine if he intends to issue a directive to the Texas state legislature to adopt his moral prescriptions as the officially sanctioned alternative to the Ten Commandments.