Civics-based homeschooling can protect religious freedom and combat anti-American curriculum, former U.S. Solicitor General Ken Starr, author of Religious Liberty in Crisis: Exercising Your Faith in an Age of Uncertainty Hardcover, advised on Monday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with Alex Marlow, author of Breaking the News: Exposing the Establishment Media’s Hidden Deals and Secret Corruption.
“There has been a collapse of civic education in the United States,” Starr held. “We and my generation have allowed the collapse. Shame on us.”
Marlow described the degradation of civic education in America as part of a design.
“I think, fundamentally, it was intentional,” he said. “I think that this is how the authoritarians get power, and the left — not everyone, but a lot of them — have authoritarian streaks and, in general, that they would love to see a citizenry that is less informed [and] less powerful, and that makes the central government more powerful.”
Starr replied, “I live in Texas, we’ve allowed a collapse of civic education. You’re right, there are very sinister courses out there, but we can’t just sit and be Cassandra-like and cry, ‘Oh, we allowed a collapse.’ We’ve got to now do something better. I am personally involved — but everyone needs to be involved — in how we restore civic education.”
He continued, “Here’s one of the things we can do. Parents and grandparents today can engage in — just like Abraham Lincoln, doggone it, like Robert Jackson of the Supreme Court of the 20th century — we teach ourselves. It’s called homeschooling, supplemental schooling. Even if your child and grandchild is sent to public schools and not getting civic education or maybe getting the wrong kind of civic education.”
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Many children are being instructed that “[America] is a bad country” and “an evil country” via public curriculum, Starr noted.
“We as parents and grandparents can say, ‘Okay, I’m going step in,’ and there are tools available, and I want my book to be one of those tools and a voice of hope, but not just, ‘Oh, hope spring eternal,’ but here are the reasons that you can give in the public debate, or you can give your child or grandchild.”
Starr described Religious Liberty in Crisis as an asset for those seeking to learn about the American principle of religious liberty. The book will further help readers “carry out intelligent conversations” through which they can persuade others to protect First Amendment protection of freedom of religion, he added.
“The first 16 words of the First Amendment [ensure] that we have this first freedom of humanity, the freedom to believe and act on those beliefs,” Starr stated. “We believe — in this country — in freedom of conscience.”
Starr described his book as timely given various lockdown and shutdown degrees — ostensibly issued by authorities to protect public health — targeting churches, synagogues, and other religious institutions and events.