Senate Bill 10 will face legal and creative challenges.
DALLAS — Gov. Greg Abbott is expected to sign a bill into law soon requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in every public school classroom in Texas.
The ACLU told WFAA it’s still lobbying for a veto but will file a suit once the governor signs it.
T. Chaz Stevens is not waiting on that.
“I’m going to make them as uncomfortable as possible,” Stevens said.
Stevens, founder of Revolt.Training, says he makes a living teaching people how to make change, not through activism alone, but through disruption.
He lives in Florida but pushes the boundaries when he challenges laws he deems unconstitutional all across the country.
So he’s designing his own version of posters that he believes adhere to the Texas law, and he’s shipping 25,000 of them to Texas.
“The First Amendment is not based by zip code,” he said.
Senate Bill 10 mandates that a specific version of the Ten Commandments — the one that’s typically associated with Protestant faiths — be displayed as a poster or in a framed copy that is at least 16 inches wide and 20 inches tall.
Stevens’s interpretation of the bill is that it does not specify what language the commandments must be written in.
So one of his designs features the commandments translated into Arabic.
Another version includes a satanic star.
And one more has the provocative words — like adultery — enlarged.
During debate on the bill while the session was still underway, supporters pushed back when opponents argued that displaying the Ten Commandments violated church and state.
State Rep. Candy Noble, (R) Murphy, argued the Ten Commandments are foundational to the nation’s government and judicial systems
“Government was not made for man. It was made by God for man. That’s what our forefathers understood in a way that we would love for our school children to understand,” she said during a hearing.
Noble sponsored the bill in the House.
Stevens has previously used similar tactics.
After Texas passed a law requiring public schools to display signs that said “In God We Trust,” Stevens sent similar posters to schools across the state.
He says, to his knowledge, none were ever displayed.
“Do I expect to win? No,” Stevens said. “Do I expect to make noise? Yes.”