Too careful

Given that civil liberties groups had threatened a neighboring school district over a display of the Ten Commandments, when Floyd County high school students started plastering copies of the verses on their lockers school officials apparently felt they couldn't be too careful.

Maybe they could.

Just days after the public school district in Giles County, just west of Roanoke, removed a public display of the Ten Commandments under the threat of litigation from the Freedom From Religion Foundation (see "Ten Down," Feb. 24), students in neighboring Floyd County began posting the verses on their lockers in protest.

Liberty Counsel, a Christian religious freedom group based in Orlando, Fla., "said it was told that administrators removed copies of the Ten Commandments placed by members of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes on Thursday at Floyd High," according to the Roanoke Times. In a letter to the Floyd County school board, Liberty Counsel chairman Matt Staver demanded that the school reverse its decision and allow the students to display the Ten Commandments.

In a press release the ACLU, which normally opposes religious displays in schools, agreed. Both groups asserted that if schools allow students to post personal expressions on their lockers, they cannot ban some displays but allow others. "What they can't do is selectively censor," Staver said, according to the Times, "and that is exactly what the school is doing."

Floyd County High School Principal Barry Hollandsworth told the Times "that the school system's attorney was looking into the matter. He declined to elaborate."

The Giles county school had hung a copy of the biblical text alongside a framed copy of the Constitution for at least a decade. When a resident complained in Dec. 2010, the school temporarily removed the sign. Outcry in January from area pastors and parents resulted in the sign being re-posted. By Feb. 22, pressure from the ACLU and the threat of legal action from the Freedom from Religion Foundation concluded in the removal of the Ten Commandments once more.

In protest, Floyd County High School students posted copies of the Ten Commandments on their lockers.

In recent years, the ACLU has sued for the removal of various copies of the Ten Commandments across the country, including a poster in an Ohio courtroom as well as an 8-foot-tall Ten Commandment monument in Oklahoma.

Displays of the Ten Commandments in two south-central Kentucky courthouses will remain barred as the decade-old legal wrangling over their presence draws to a close.

Last year, ACLU v. Grayson County, Kentucky, dealing with the posting of the Ten Commandments in a Kentucky courthouse, was decided by the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals. The court ruled in favor of keeping the biblical text on display. The ACLU chose not to appeal the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled it unconstitutional for public schools to post the Ten Commandments unless it is justified by a broader educational context.

The Associated Press contributed to this article.

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