When Texas Gov. Greg Abbott was serving as his state’s attorney general in 2005, he appeared before the Supreme Court to argue Van Orden v. Perry.

The question was whether a monument inscribed with the Ten Commandments that had stood on the grounds of the Texas state Capitol since 1961 violated the First Amendment.

That amendment says in part: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

Had Texas established a religion in 1961 by allowing this monument on its Capitol grounds?

In the 1947 case of Everson v. Board of Education, the court ruled 5-4 it was acceptable for a state government to provide students with transportation to both public and religious schools, but that the First Amendment, “made applicable to the states by the Fourteenth Amendment,” required separation of church and state.

“The Constitution requires not comprehensive identification of state with religion, but complete separation,” wrote Justice Hugo Black.

Then in 1980, in another 5-4 decision in Stone v. Graham, the court cited a test it had established in the 1971 Lemon v. Kurtzman case as justification for prohibiting Kentucky from posting the Ten Commandments in public-school classrooms. “This court,” said that opinion, “has announced a three-part test for determining whether a challenged state statute is permissible under the Establishment Clause of the........

© The Daily Signal