“Few speeches delivered by an American leader in the modern era have addressed the cultural crisis facing this country with such clarity, vision, and moral courage as former Attorney General Bill Barr’s remarks Friday to Alliance Defending Freedom. Accepting ADF’s Edwin Meese Award for ‘Originalism and Religious Liberty,’ Barr argued that ‘the greatest threat to religious liberty in America today’ is ‘the increasingly militant and extreme secular-progressive climate of our state-run educational system.’ The left-wing curriculum being taught in government-run schools, Barr argued, is so aggressively anti-Christian–and indeed anti-religious–that it represents a violation of the constitutional rights of Americans of faith. Barr began his remarks with a brief history of America’s approach to public schooling, dividing it into three distinct phases. During the first phase–which encompassed most of American history up until the 1970s–the instruction students received in the public school system was ‘committed to Judeo-Christian values in the general sense.’ During the second phase which ‘came in the latter part of the 20th century,’ Barr notes, ‘the left embarked on a relentless campaign of secularization intent on driving every vestige of religion from the public square.’ God was driven out of the curriculum based on the idea that public schools should be entirely neutral toward religion. But now, Barr said, we are witnessing a third phase. Instead of merely purging schools of religion, we’re ‘now seeing an affirmative indoctrination with a secular belief system and worldview that is a substitute for religion and is antithetical to the beliefs and values of traditional God-centered religion.’ He cited two examples. The first was the transgender ideology that is permeating public schools across the country. The former Attorney General went on to describe Critical Race Theory. It was President Trump who remarked last year that school choice is ‘the civil rights issue of our time.’ Barr argued that ‘confronting this issue, I think, is the most urgent task for people who are concerned about religious liberty.’ ‘Religious liberty,’ Barr said, ‘is not safe in the United States as long as we have the kind of public school system we have, the forced monopoly and the indoctrination of children into these radical secular progressive orthodoxies.’”
“Former AG Barr,” Association of Mature American Citizens, May 21, 2021