Long before La.’s new law, Ky. parents won a major Ten Commandments case

Anne Long can still recall the Ten Commandments hanging on the wall of her childhood classroom in a Kentucky public school some 70 years ago.

They were enormous and “kind of yellow and plastic,” Long, 82 said. “And nobody paid any attention to it.”

That changed when Kentucky passed a law in 1978 mandating that the Ten Commandments be placed in all public classrooms. Long’s mother, Anne Bowers, joined three other Louisville residents to challenge what they argued was an affront to the Constitution. The case wound its way to the Supreme Court, which ultimately struck down the Kentucky law: There was no secular purpose to post the Ten Commandments in classrooms, the court stated in its 1980 Stone v. Graham decision.

Forty-four years later, Long and others with ties to the Supreme Court case said seeing Louisiana enact a nearly identical law is like watching history repeat itself — and threatens the line between church and state they fought to maintain.

Louisiana is the first state to require the Ten Commandments in public schools since the 1980 Supreme Court ruling, and nine plaintiffs filed a lawsuit this week claiming the law violates parents’ rights. The Louisiana governor has signaled that he welcomes the challenge, and experts say it will test the new legal climate created by the conservative-leaning high court.

Long said it’s unsurprising that this tension has resurfaced given the country’s political climate, but the answer is in the Constitution, she added. “You want religion to be free from the government, just as you want the government to be free from religion,” Long said.

Others find the issue springing up again to be exhausting. “My first reaction was like, really? You have got to be kidding me. Open up a history book,” Vivian Stone-Taylor told The Washington Post, whose grandmother was one of the four plaintiffs in 1980. “This has already made it all the way to the Supreme Court.”

Like the lawsuit filed this week against Louisiana, the Kentucky suit represented a variety of religious and political backgrounds. There was Sydell Stone, a Unitarian stay-at-home mom and activist; Bowers, an atheist and Republican precinct captain; Patricia Bricking, a Catholic public school teacher; and Martin Perley, a rabbi.

The four plaintiffs argued the law was unconstitutional, flouting the separation between church and state. Proponents of the law, meanwhile, argued that the nation was founded upon the ideals of the Ten Commandments, according to interviews with local media at the time. (Supporters of Louisiana’s law have made similar statements.)

Marvin Coan, who helped litigate the case alongside William Stone, took on the lawsuit in his first year as general counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky. Neither he nor Stone, who could not be reached for comment, realized how far the case would go, he said.

The Kentucky statute required the then-superintendent of public instruction, James Graham, to ensure that the Ten Commandments were displayed in all public classrooms. To get around legal challenges, it said that the displays must be paid for through donations, not tax dollars, and mandated that a statement accompany the display positing the Ten Commandments as a “fundamental legal code of Western civilization and the Common Law of the United States.” (The Louisiana law carries similar provisions.)

Coan and his team lost the case in the Franklin County Circuit Court. They appealed, and the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled in favor of the state as well. They took it to the Supreme Court.

As the case moved through the courts, Stone-Taylor said her grandmother, Sydell Stone, began fielding routine accusations that she didn’t believe in God. (She certainly did, Stone-Taylor, 52, said.) Patricia Bricking faced the ire of her devoutly Catholic relatives, who were upset at her for participating in the public opposition, her daughter Elizabeth Bricking, 55, told The Post. Long said she recalled her mother testifying against the law at the state capitol and almost being driven off the road on the way back home to Louisville.

The Supreme Court reversed the Kentucky rulings without hearing oral arguments in November 1980. The rare move indicated how clear the law was on the matter, Coan said.

“Those kind of per curiam opinions and summary reversals are because enough members of the court believe that the outcome is obvious as a matter of law and requires no further argument,” he said, adding: “There was a lot of very well-established First Amendments decisions that the U.S. Supreme Court had, and as a result of that, five of the members of the court said, ‘we don’t need to have this briefed, we don’t need to have this argued.’ ”

After two years of household conversations about the law, Stone-Taylor said she remembers her grandmother calling the day the Supreme Court ruling broke. The ruling was no surprise to her grandmother though, she said. “She knew they were right,” Stone-Taylor recalled.

Elizabeth Bricking, 12 at the time, had played sick to stay home from school. A “Good Morning America” segment about their family and their involvement in the lawsuit was set to air, and she was eager to see it. “I was excited to be on the news,” she laughed. “I faked sick, because I don’t think I would have gotten our teachers to stop and watch it.”

After the Supreme Court ruling broke, her family’s phone began ringing nonstop. Reporters were calling to talk to her mom, Bricking said, “so I was just taking all these messages.”

“We got a couple of mad calls, too,” she said. “Angry people cussing us out.”

Her mother returned home in a flurry. “She was like, ‘we won, we won!’ And it was really exciting,” Patricia Bricking said.

William Stone, the case’s chief litigator, told the Courier-Journal at the time that the ruling was a landmark for the decade.

“I think the court is letting it be known they’re still there to protect the Constitution,” he said, according to the paper. “I think it’s going to be one of the most significant Supreme Court opinions of the 1980s.”

Kentucky’s law did not pass the Lemon v. Kurtzman test, which determines whether a law violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. To pass the Lemon test, a law must meet three benchmarks: it must have a secular purpose; it must have a predominantly secular effect; and it must not cause “excessive entanglement” between government and religion.

“The Kentucky law couldn’t even pass under the first test,” Coan said. “What is the secular purpose? There is none. It’s critically religious in nature.”

The “excessive entanglement” between government and religion is clear, too, he added. “If the government is requiring it to be posted, how much more entangled can you be?”

Coan said he expects the Louisiana law will face the same fate.

But some legal experts have stated the country now wades in uncharted territory. Recent Supreme Court rulings have been more lenient toward religion in schools, such as in 2022, when the court ruled in favor of a Washington state football coach who knelt at midfield to pray and was joined by student-athletes.

“The Supreme Court has moved away from the decisions of the ’70s and ’80s,” said Steven Smith, a law professor at the University of San Diego. In the case of the Washington state football coach, it reached a decision “that was quite unlikely 20 or 30 years ago” by tossing out the very Lemon test that determined the 1980 case, he said.

The court stated it will follow “history and tradition” instead, Smith said. It remains unclear what that means.

“At this point, it’s really just sort of uncertain what direction the court might take,” Smith said. “I don’t think people who are confident either way would be very justified at this point.”

Still, Coan remains confident that the precedent Kentucky set will endure.

“I might be in the minority. But I don’t think the court will go there,” Coan said. “I have confidence that common sense is going to prevail.”

Alice Crites contributed to this report.