Constitutional Law

Va. school district removes Ten Commandments displays

By By The Associated Press

RICHMOND, Va. ? A southwest Virginia school system has again removed all displays of the Ten Commandments, a month after reposting them despite concerns that doing so was unconstitutional.

The Giles County School Board called a special meeting yesterday and voted to remove the framed, 4-foot-tall, biblical texts, said Amanda Tickle, the board?s clerk.

The Ten Commandments had been posted in the district's five schools and technology center for at least a decade next to framed copies of the U.S. Constitution. School officials took them down in December on the advice of the school board's attorney. That move came after the Freedom From Religion Foundation, a civil rights group, notified Superintendent Terry Arbogast about the issue.

The board reversed that decision Jan. 20 after a group of parents and ministers argued that schools had a moral obligation to reinforce God's teachings.

A telephone message left for Arbogast wasn't returned in time for this story.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation and other groups say such displays clearly violate the Constitution's separation of church and state, and have threatened legal action.

Kent Willis, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia, said Giles County school officials hadn't notified his group of the removal, but that it was a good development.

"This is precisely what we were looking for," Willis said yesterday. "As for litigation, we're still weighing our options and it depends on what happens in the future," such as whether the Ten Commandments returned to the schools in some form.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that it's unconstitutional for public schools to post the Ten Commandments unless it's part of a broader educational context, and that the First Amendment guarantees separation of church and state on the federal, state and local levels.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court declined without comment yesterday to hear a case challenging a previous ruling that struck down the display of the Ten Commandments in two Kentucky courthouses. The Court ruled in McCreary County v. ACLU (2005) that the displays in McCreary and Pulaski counties represented an unconstitutional endorsement of Christianity.

Full post as published by First Amendment Center on February 22, 2011 (boomark / email).