Texas’ Ten Commandments rule shows sharia law is closer than we think | Opinion
Greg Abbott tried to warn me. So did John Cornyn. Ken Paxton, too.
Texas leaders tried to tell me that we were in danger of a hyperstrict religious imposition forcing its way into Texas life. They warned me, of course, about sharia cities.
Now, what is “sharia”? The word is foreign to me, so I’m unsure. Learning about sharia would require research, curiosity and an understanding of words and customs outside myself. It might lead me to scroll a reputable news source, skim through a book or, most frightening of all, speak to the people who I’m told practice it. Developing a basic understanding of new information could take minutes, even hours of my time. Who has time for that when I have opinions that need to be shared? So, I will trust my leaders when they tell me that a religious system is in danger of destroying Texas life as we know it.
Cornyn, our senior U.S. senator, successfully lobbied the Department of Justice to investigate this to ensure my liberties weren’t impinged, but the DOJ dropped the case, unable to find sufficient evidence. How that happened is beyond me. Sharia city? More like sharia state! Everywhere I look, I see sharia’s influence.
Soon, any child who enters a Texas public school classroom will be in a room where the religious zealots require the posting of the Ten Commandments, a text from their holy book. Not as a matter of studying cultures to help students develop a sense of the variety of people in their land but as the religiously informed moral code they must follow.
Even religious parents, those who abide by the Ten Commandments and those who don’t, see the obvious assault on their freedoms.
“While our Jewish faith treats the Ten Commandments as sacred, the version mandated under this law does not match the text followed by our family, and the school displays will conflict with the religious beliefs and values we seek to instill in our child,” wrote Rabbi Mara Nathan, one of the plaintiffs in the ACLU lawsuit against this planned assault against her liberties.
Another plaintiff, Arvind Chandrakantan, said that aspects of his family’s religion, particularly polytheism and pluralism, conflict with the monotheistic precepts undergirding the Ten Commandments. For Chandrakantan, there is more than one way to God and more than one representation.
“Public schools — and the state of Texas — have no place pushing their preferred religious beliefs on my children, let alone denigrating my faith, which is about as un-American and un-Texan as one can be,” he said.
The shariaists have made their labyrinth of education laws so invasive, I couldn’t escape it if I tried. My free and (formerly) secular school is losing tax dollars due to vouchers for private schools whose entire curriculum is oriented around those same religious texts. Back in 2017, UT-Austin professor Paul von Hippel found that 71% of Texas private schools are religious, with most having names that include terms such as “Saint (St.),” “Lutheran,” “Episcopal” and “Trinity.” Now, my tax dollars are functionally subsidizing the dominant religion’s rapid expansion.
And if you still doubt that Austin has fallen, the same crusaders enacted a law allowing schools to set up official periods of prayer and Bible reading. Participation is optional, but those ideologues have already made it legal to punish providers who help people obtain abortions and are even trying to prosecute providers outside of the state. And now, they’re trying to entrench their power nationally by pushing their political opponents out of their congressional districts at the behest of the president, giving them more authority to impose their way of life across the country. That same president’s administration is now encouraging federal employees to convert their coworkers to their faith.
Sharia law is here, and it’s getting worse by the hour. I can’t believe that we would allow Christian Nationalists to force us to comply under a bitter, cruel, reactionary expression of their relig–
Wait, sharia is an Arabic word? This was about Muslim Americans?
That can’t be true! And anyone who’s been to a Texas classroom should know what the Bible says about bearing false witness.
This story was originally published August 3, 2025 at 4:53 AM with the headline "Texas’ Ten Commandments rule shows sharia law is closer than we think | Opinion."
