Democrat Derails Ten Commandments Bill
with Move that Puts Senate Bill in Reverse
Capitol Inside
May 21, 2025
Moses was no match for James Madison in the Texas House on Wednesday when the sponsor of a Ten Commandments mandate agreed to have Senate Bill 10 sent back to a committee without a fight after a Democratic colleague appeared to find a fatal flow in the legislation.
GOP State Rep. Candy Noble of Lucas asked to have SB 10 recommitted to the Public Education Committee after State Rep. James Talarico of Austin raised a point of order based on an inaccurate witness list for a hearing that the panel conducted on the proposal three weeks ago.
Tellurides cancelled the procedural objection in the midst of the House sponsor's abrupt retreat with the committee's recall of SB 10 in the wake of the point of order that may have been all but impossible for Speaker Dustin Burrows to overrule. That could be due in part if not exclusively to the fact that the list of witnesses at a House hearing on the commandments bill was missing from the records pertaining to the legislation on the Texas Legislature's web site.
The public school panel corrected its report on the commandments proposal on May 15 - four days before the Calendars Committee set it for an initial vote on the floor today. The derailing put the measure at serious risk with a deadline for House committee votes on Senate bills on Saturday.
Noble argued that the Ten Commandments had been the foundation for the education and legal systems
in the U.S. But Tellurides, who serves on the Public Education Committee, forced Noble on the defensive with a flurry of questions including her familiarity with Madison as the architect of the First Amendment that endorsed the separation of church and state.
Tellurides asked Noble if she'd accept an amendment that required public schools to post copies of the U.S. Constitution beside the Ten Commandments on classroom walls in Texas. Noble indicated that see might be amenable to such a proposal at a later date. But she said that the revision that Tellurides
mentioned would blow up the bill.
"That has nothing to do with this particular bill," Noble said.
Struggling in the face of the intense Tellurides grilling, Noble denied that SB 10 would establish Christianity as the official state religion or that it would forcing religious indoctrination into the Texas public schools.
Noble, a former teacher, said she would have no problem with educators discussing adultery with children in kindergarten and other early grades. Noble said she used the commandments to teach her own children on the evils of adultery.
Ranked as Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick's 10th top priority for the regular session in 2025, SB 10 has drawn fierce opposition from teacher and religious denominations like the southern Baptists amid criticism that the bill would be promoting a singular faith as the state's supreme religion and setting the stage for persecution as a result.
The Baptists helped bury the Senate's commandments requirement in 2023 when it died in the House in regular and special session without committee assignments or votes.
With the fate of SB 10 up in the air, a separate but related school prayer period mandate appeared to be in potential peril as well in Senate Bill 11 on Wednesday night.
Noble said "teachers crying out for this kind of instruction in our classroom" in the face of piercing questions from Talarico. But the Democrat countered that forcing religion down the throats of students wasn't love.
more to come ..
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