THE ACLU'S TEN COMMANDMENTS LAWYERS ARE HEADING FOR THE EXITS, JUST AS BRAUN MOVES TO END THE CASE

Gov. Mike Braun at a press conference in Gary, Oct. 30, 2025. Photo: U.S. Department of Homeland Security / Tia Dufour (public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.

Flip to the last page of the ACLU of Indiana's amended complaint against Gov. Mike Braun, the filing meant to keep a seven-foot, 11,500-pound slab of Bedford limestone off the Statehouse lawn, and three names sit above the signature line: Kenneth J. Falk, Stevie J. Pactor and Joshua T. Bleisch.

All three are now on their way out the door.

IndyStar reported Thursday that four of the ACLU of Indiana's five principal attorneys have submitted resignations: legal director Ken Falk, deputy legal director Gavin Rose, senior staff attorney Stevie Pactor and staff attorney Josh Bleisch. Together they account for roughly 50 years at the organization. At least two other staffers have also resigned, according to the paper.

The timing could hardly be stranger. Three days earlier, on Monday, Oct. 19, Braun asked the federal court in Indianapolis to throw out the very lawsuit those lawyers signed, according to a Becket press release and coverage by The Indiana Lawyer and WBIW. The state is represented by Becket, a Washington religious-liberty law firm, and by Attorney General Todd Rokita's office through Solicitor General James Barta.

A monument a vandal knocked down

The fight is older than some of the people now covering it. A Ten Commandments monument stood on the Statehouse grounds from 1958 until 1991, when it was vandalized and toppled, according to the ACLU's own complaint. In 2000, then-Gov. Frank O'Bannon, a Democrat, accepted a four-sided replacement from the Indiana Limestone Institute bearing the Ten Commandments, the Bill of Rights and the Preamble to the 1851 Indiana Constitution.

The ACLU sued before it could be set in place. A federal judge blocked it in 2000, the 7th Circuit affirmed, and a permanent injunction followed in 2002. The stone has sat outside a church in Bedford ever since. Becket says the plaintiffs back then included the vandal himself.

"The ACLU is just trying to finish in the courts what the vandal started at the statehouse," Becket senior counsel Joseph Davis said in the firm's release. "Lemon may be dead, but its ghost still haunts America's public square."

Why the old ruling is on thin ice

The 2000 ruling leaned on the Supreme Court's Lemon test, which the justices threw out in the 2022 Kennedy v. Bremerton School District decision in favor of a history-and-tradition standard. The state also points to Van Orden v. Perry, the 2005 case that upheld a Ten Commandments monument at the Texas Capitol.

In a May order reopening the case, the federal court agreed the ground had shifted, writing that continued enforcement of an injunction "supported entirely by precedent that has now been abrogated, is not equitable." But the court stopped short of declaring the monument constitutional, saying it did not yet have "a sufficient factual record" to make that call. That is the question Braun's summary judgment motion now puts squarely in front of the judge.

The ACLU has not budged. Its amended complaint argues that "there is no longstanding historical practice or tradition of posting the Ten Commandments on public property" and that placing the stone at the seat of state government would amount to an establishment of religion. Hoosiers can disagree with that, and many do, but it is a real legal argument, and the organization deserves to have it made well.

Who argues it now?

That is where the ACLU's internal mess becomes a public question. According to IndyStar, the walkouts center on incoming executive director Nikkita Oliver, whose start date has been postponed while the board brings in an outside human resources firm to review staff complaints. Oliver disputes the allegations and has said their comments were mischaracterized, The Indianapolis Focal reported. The board is standing by Oliver.

Staffers told reporters they worry the group is drifting from its core civil-liberties mission toward activist-driven "movement lawyering." The board told IndyStar that Oliver does not intend to bring that approach to the Indiana chapter and that its mission is not changing. In a statement to WFIU, the board said it is working to identify an interim legal director.

Rose, a 20-year veteran, put it bluntly in a resignation letter quoted by IndyStar: "Suddenly and unpredictably, this organization is no longer the one to which I have devoted my entire career."

The Focal reports that Bleisch's last day is Oct. 30 and that he plans to return to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, while Rose set a Feb. 15 departure to wrap up casework. The Ten Commandments case is still pending in the Southern District of Indiana.

The bottom line

For a quarter century, the ACLU of Indiana has been the group that kept Indiana's history in a churchyard in Bedford. Now Braun and Rokita are pressing the case in court at the exact moment the lawyers who built the other side are packing their boxes. The court, not the Statehouse, will decide whether the stone comes home, and the state still has to prove its case under the new test. But nobody should pretend this week's resignations don't change the fight.

Photo: U.S. Department of Homeland Security / Tia Dufour, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Written by Hoosiers, for Hoosiers.