In a lawsuit against Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters, the state’s Supreme Court issued a temporary stay, prohibiting the Oklahoma Department of Education from using taxpayer dollars to purchase Bibles and Bible-based instructional materials.
The decision halted an early stage of the acquisition process, during which the state sought proposals on how best to acquire the Christian texts and a curriculum to accompany them.
“These were always a part of the conversations as, ‘What is the cheapest amount we can get Bibles for? Can we have donated?’ It was always a part of the conversation,” Walters said, per KOCO 5 News.
This comes as Walters recently announced a new partnership with “God Bless the U.S.A.” singer Lee Greenwood to lead “a nationwide campaign to donate Bibles to classrooms across the State of Oklahoma.”
An Oklahoma Department of Education press release stated that the partnership hopes to bring “back foundational texts into the educational system, emphasizing their historical and cultural significance.”
Court documents reportedly showed that the state Office of Management and Enterprise Services sought the stay because the proposal requested purchasing as many as 55,000 Bibles for 5th—to 12th-grade public school classrooms.
The order also applies to “any other action to implement or enforce the ‘Bible Education Mandate'” and stays any effort “to further the ‘Mandate’ in any other way.”
The plaintiffs in Rev. Lori Walke v. Ryan Walters were represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The legal group’s website called the stay order “a victory for religious freedom, public education and church-state separation.”
“This victory is an important step toward protecting the religious freedom of every student and parent in Oklahoma. Superintendent Ryan Walters has been abusing his power, and the court checked those abuses today. Our diverse coalition of families and clergy remains united against Walters’s extremism and in favor of a core First Amendment principle: the separation of church and state,” a statement from the plaintiffs read.
Political organizations in Oklahoma have long noted the seeming gap between the tilt of the state’s voting electorate and its Supreme Court.
“Oklahoma has a reputation for being one of the nation’s most conservative states with Republicans routinely elected to statewide office and the Legislature, where the GOP has long held supermajorities. But our judiciary has been well to the left of the electorate for decades,” an article in the journal Oklahoma Council Of Public Affairs noted.
Researchers from a political science journal measured the left-wing leanings of the court’s justices, finding them to be greater than in most other states, except for Hawaii, West Virginia, and Maryland.