Louisiana's plan to put the Ten Commandments in every public classroom is fundamentally flawed, parents opposed to the project said in court documents.
Parents are suing to stop a new state law which requires the Ten Commandments to be displayed in every public school classroom in the state. It does not provide a budget for the project and says that schools can accept donations of Ten Commandments posters or money to buy posters.
Lawyers filed a brief in federal court on Monday saying that the state keeps making the argument that children are not being coerced by the presence of the Ten Commandments, but that does not reflect the reality.
Republican Governor Jeff Landry signed the bill into law in June.
The parents, led by a unitarian minister, say that the law violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, which states that the U.S government cannot promote any particular religion.
Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the American Civil Liberties Union and others have backed the plaintiffs, arguing that the law violates long-standing U.S. Supreme Court precedent.
The parents are seeking an injunction to prevent the posters being placed in schools, which is due to begin January 1.
"Defendants' motion to dismiss and opposition to Plaintiffs' preliminary-injunction motion are premised on a fundamentally flawed understanding of what is at issue in this case," the parents' filing states.
Louisiana has proposed putting the Ten Commandments beside words from the musical Hamilton or writings of the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Baden Ginsburg as a way of finding middle ground.
"Whether public schools decide to hang displays of the Ten Commandments standing alone or, for instance, comparing the commandments to the musical Hamilton, has no bearing on Plaintiffs' facial challenge under the First Amendment," the filing states.
"Regardless of variations in content, the minimum requirements of the Act demand permanent displays that all feature one unavoidable constant as their focus: a state-adopted, Protestant version of the Ten Commandments."
They also dispute Louisiana's claim that the display of the commandments does not coerce children in any way.
"Defendants' coercion argument suffers from the same fatal flaw as their other arguments: Defendants wrongly assume that the coercion analysis depends on the specific content of individual displays."
It says that it "will subject students, including the minor-child Plaintiffs, to a state-approved, Protestant version of the Ten Commandments in every classroom for every day of their public-school education," it adds.
"The Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized that children are particularly susceptible to religious indoctrination at school, both because they are captive audiences to the state's religious messages and because they are vulnerable to the immediate impressions and judgments of their teachers and classmates if they do not fall in line with the state's preferred religious beliefs."
Newsweek sought email comment from the Louisiana Attorney General and from the plaintiffs' attorney on Tuesday.
The lawsuit was launched in June by parents of various backgrounds, with Unitarian minister Reverend Darcy Roake as the lead plaintiff.
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