All 16 Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter yesterday to 93 U.S. attorneys across the land demanding to know just “how they intend to execute Attorney General Merrick Garland’s recent directive to mobilize the FBI and other law enforcement against ‘concerned’ parents at school board meetings.”
The letter referred to Garland’s demand that each U.S. attorney draft a “partnership” strategy with state and local law enforcement to “identify” and “prosecute” what Garland said was a “disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.”
The Republicans decried the “troubling attempts” by the Department of Justice and the White House to target parents expressing their strong opinions at board meetings on various topics, including especially the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT). After all, said the letter, “Parents have an undisputed right to direct the upbringing and education of their children … [and] we must not tolerate the use of the federal law enforcement apparatus to intimidate and silence parents using their Constitutional rights to advocate for their child’s future.”
The letter referred to the causative agent behind the move — the outrageous letter from the National School Boards Association (NSBA) declaring that “as these acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials have increased, the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.” The NSBA requested that “a joint collaboration among federal law enforcement agencies, state and local law enforcement, and with public school officials be undertaken to focus on these threats.”
The letter said it is time to “deal with” those parents:
As the threats grow and news of extremist hate organizations showing up at school board meetings as being reported, this is a critical time for a proactive approach to deal with this difficult issue.
Garland was only too happy to agree, sending his demand letter to his attorneys just four days after the NSBA letter was sent to the White House.
It didn’t matter that, on October 22, the NSBA sent a weak-kneed letter of apology, intoning, “We regret and apologize for the letter.… There was no justification for some of the language included in the letter.”
Assuming that the Republicans receive the information they requested from the 93 U.S. attorneys (by November 15, if you please), what then? The cat is out of the bag. The wheels have been set in motion. Parents will have their First Amendment rights to speak in public chilled and dampened out of fear that some federal agent is attending the board meeting, taking notes and surreptitious video of their comments, to result in a knock on their door later that night by law enforcement.
It’s long past time for parents to realize what has happened to public schools and to make the appropriate decision about keeping their children in them, or not. Back in 1981, reformed pastor David H. Chilton asked rhetorically, “What’s Really Wrong with Public Schools?”
He wrote:
The usual argument against public education is very convincing. And very wrong.
It runs something like this: Public schools have become breeding grounds for violence and sexual promiscuity; they often are outlets for socialist propaganda; they now constitute a formidable enemy of Christianity (by teaching evolution and prohibiting prayer and Bible reading) and of the family (by teaching sex education and deriding traditional authority structures).
And so on — which is not an unmitigated tragedy, since it is being used, under the providence of God, to lead more and more Christians to abandon the system of public education. No matter what the reason, that is certainly a good result.
Unfortunately, the argument above is not as principled as it looks. It is not an argument against state education, but only against certain perceived ills of public schools as they now exist.
The real problem with public schools, according to Chilton, is far deeper and more profound than concerns over sexual promiscuity or the teaching of CRT:
The real problem with public schools is that they exist in the first place.
They are an ungodly, unlawful, collectivist institution. The many evils now spewing out of them derive from the curse of God inflicted on all institutions that defy Him.
He has commanded parents to educate their children in terms of His law; that cannot be done in a public school. If we want our children to fear Him, to grow into diligent workers for His kingdom, we cannot afford to train them in an institution which has as its fundamental presupposition that I am entitled to as much money as I can vote out of my neighbor’s pocket.
Prayer doesn’t belong in a public school (Proverbs 28:9). Your money doesn’t belong in a public school. Most of all, your children don’t belong in a public school. Institutions premised on sin must not be redeemed, but abandoned.
