In this episode Trent critiques Elizabeth Bartholet’s argument for banning homeschooling and overly broad shutdown orders that forbid even the safest forms of public worship.
ADDENDUM: Please accept with humble obedience your pastor and bishop’s recommendations on when to resume public masses. I’ll elaborate on that in a future episode.
Welcome to the Council of Trend podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
What should the government do to combat the COVID-19 pandemic? It’s a good question that a lot of people are asking, but an equally important question that not enough people are asking is this, what should the government not do to combat this pandemic? Or what should the government not do in general, even when it’s faced with a problem or it’s trying to promote the common good, the greater good? What should government not do? What are some freedoms that are inviolable, inalienable that we ought not give up for any kind of greater good? That’s what I want to talk about here on the Council of Trend podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answer’s apologist and speaker Trent Horn.
And right now of course, we’re dealing with an unprecedented time in our nation’s history, in the world’s history when it comes to fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. But what I’m concerned about is that there are some people who are so focused on the problem that they only see the problem and think we got to do whatever it takes to stop this problem. And it’s a serious problem, it definitely deserves a serious response, but when you adopt the mindset of do whatever it takes, you can end up endorsing some very dangerous solutions in order to secure the policy initiatives that you want.
We always have to remember what Ian Malcolm said from Jurassic Park, “You were so worried and caught up with wondering whether you could do it that you didn’t stop to think if you should.” Now, I don’t think the government is going to start breeding dinosaurs that are going to go haywire and eat all of us. Though I did read an article a few months ago that they think within five years we could have a real life Jurassic park, and I’m thinking, did you not see the movies? Unless we have Chris Pratt there to protect us, I am not going to go.
All right, let’s reel it back to the topic that I want to discuss today, infringements on our civil liberties and freedoms and the most basic freedoms we have. And I’m not going to talk about the whole lockdowns or the different strategies that are related to that. I have my own opinions on that subject that maybe in the future I’ll do an episode for that just for our subscribers at TrentHornPodcast.com because while we are in sheltering place, stay at home orders, I’ve had a lot of time to think about this and wonder what’s the most prudent policy to go forward, but I’m not going to talk about lockdowns and their infringement on liberties per se and whether it’s justified or unjustified. Instead, what I want to focus on are three essential rights that we have that I am concerned that they’re going to be violated in the midst of this pandemic or people are going to use this disaster as a springboard to violate those rights, and those are the rights to educate our children, the right to worship and the right to be able to peaceably assemble and to be safe in our home.
So let’s start with the first one, the right to educate children. And I know a lot of other people have addressed this article and this law review article previously, but I figured I might as well take my crack at it now. It’s an article in Harvard magazine, their May-June edition called The Risks of Homeschooling by Erin O’Donnell and it talks about the work of Elizabeth Bartholet. She is a public interest professor of law and faculty director of the Harvard Law School’s child advocacy program. And so what Bartholet is doing, she’s actually taking part in a summit at Harvard Law School talking about efforts to ban homeschooling because she believes that there is enough of a risk when it comes to homeschooling, that it ought to be banned or there ought to be a presumptive ban so that if you want to educate your children at home like we do in the Horn household, then the burden is on you to show to the government why you ought to be granted an exception to do that and that the presumption should be that the government educates children so that it wouldn’t even just be homeschooling, this would be something that would also affect a lot of different kinds of private schools.
I think ultimately what Bartholet and [inaudible 00:03:45] want is they want government to be able to educate all children because they argue that government has some kind of right to educate children and that parents don’t really have a similar or a supervenient or preventing right to be able to do the same. So in this article by Erin O’Donnell called The Risks of Homeschooling she interviews Bartholet and says Bartholet sees risks for children and society in homeschooling and recommends a presumptive ban on the practice. She says that homeschooling violates a child’s right to a “meaningful education” and the right to be protected from child abuse and it may keep them from contributing positively to a democratic society.
And so there’s even a picture of the article at Harvard magazine where it shows a homeschooling child who is inside of a house with bars on the windows. The house is constructed with books and the books are reading, writing, Bible and arithmatic misspelled. It was misspelled previously, but then they changed the drawing in a later update to the article. I think enough people were distressing that the whole article is a cheap shot. But even that, to say that homeschoolers can’t spell arithmetic right … When you see homeschool kids at spelling bees, I mean they can spell their way like nobody’s business, and we’ll get to the benefits of homeschooling here shortly, but it says that you got the homeschool student locked inside of this house while the other kids play outside.
When anyone who is homeschooled … And by the way, I was not raised in a homeschooling environment. I’m thinking about writing a book in the future called Confessions of a Homeschool Skeptic, who knows if someone already has written a book like that, but I went to government-run schools, I don’t call them public schools, I call them government-run school, people are like “Trent, you’re getting really intense about this.” I’m like, yeah, I am kind of intense because I remember the experiences that I had in “public schools”, I don’t like calling them that, they’re government-run schools. They’re government schools. If you feel that it’s best for your child, then that is your free choice to do that. You should be able to enroll your child in a government-run school. I have no problem with that. I went through government education my whole life from kindergarten all the way up through till college, and the thing is the bright spots stick out for me because there were so few of them. And I think if you’re listening to this and you went to a public school, you probably feel the same way.
Who is just an amazing teacher that you had? I bet that probably it was a minority of them. I remember we had a chemistry teacher in my high school, we would ask her questions about the assignments and the textbook and the only thing she would say to us was, “Guys, these aren’t my notes, okay? These aren’t my notes that I’m using.” I don’t think she actually knew anything about chemistry at all. In one of our government classes, we spent a week playing Monopoly. For the final exam for my eighth grade Spanish one class, you know what we did for the final project for our eighth grade Spanish one class? We watched Selena. “This is the bumper from the bus of Selena.” It wasn’t even in Spanish. It wasn’t even in Spanish. The teacher just put that on for us to watch. So for me, I went through the whole government-run school program, I think I turned out decently … Well, the teachers didn’t like me as much because I was the classic underachiever. I remember I had a teacher mark me down a letter grade on an assignment simply because she said, “I know you could have tried harder on this.” Imagine if I had said, well, you could have tried harder in class today, but nobody’s docking your pay. Would have been sent to detention for sure, I imagine. So it gets me amped up when I read this.
And obviously not every homeschooling environment is perfect and some of them are deficient or abusive, but that’s something that you find deficient or abusive educational practices are something that is across the board in private education, government-run schools and homeschooling. We ought to have public policy programs that protect children no matter how they’re schooled and not have this kind of presumption that government knows best, because that’s certainly not the case.
And so I was just reading through this article and I read through some of Bartholet’s longer piece in the Arizona law review and just a few things stuck out at me in how she’s tries to argue that parents don’t really have a right to educate their children. And she’s not alone in thinking this, that a lot of academics argue … What they’ll say is that “No, parents don’t have a natural right to their children. The state confers parenthood upon children and families.” So it’s a legal right established by the state for the state to confer, not a natural right intrinsic to our human nature that the state merely recognizes.
You know what the biggest blow was to the rights of parents actually? So-called same sex marriage. So prior to so-called same sex marriage you had what was called the presumption of paternity. So if a woman gives birth to a child, it is presumed that her husband is the father of that child. The person she is married to is given presumptive paternity and he is the only one who can challenge the paternity of that child. And presented paternity is something that’s allowed for familial stability for centuries, but guess what? Now when marriage was redefined, if you have this presumption of paternity where you say, “Oh yeah, we presume that the person who is married to the woman who gives birth is the father of this child” guess what? That doesn’t work anymore when you have women who are legally married to other women, who 100% of the time are not biologically related to these children.
So law review articles were talking about this even a decade ago saying we have to get rid of the presumption of paternity, that parenthood is not a natural right, a natural reality that the state recognizes. It is something that the state imposes, declares upon the relationships between parents and children. It’s something that belongs to the state, doesn’t belong to the parents. Here is James Dwyer, another Harvard professor, one of Bartholet’s confederates in all this. Here’s what he says on the matter of the relationship between parent, child and the state.
James Dwyer:
The state needs to be the ultimate guarantor of a child’s wellbeing. There’s just no alternative to that. The reason parent-child relationships exist is because the state confers legal parenthood.
TH:
Did you hear what he said? I got to repeat that again so you get that in your mind, the reason parent child relationships exist is not because parents produce children, and that is part of the natural law and our human nature to produce children who then are under the custody of their parents as part of the familial bond, no. The reason parent-child relationships exist, I would say is because of the biology. No, what he’s saying is is because the state confers legal parenthood, that maybe you’re a parent in a biological sense, but that doesn’t matter squat unless the state legally recognizes you to be a parent. He goes on to say this about the relationship between government and parents and family. It’s a short clip, but let me play it.
James Dwyer:
That’s the state that is empowering parents to do anything with the children, to take them home.
TH:
He says it’s the state that is empowering parents to do anything with children. So that was James Dwyer at Harvard law. And this is something that starts in academia, it starts in the ivory tower and then trickles its way down in among the common man. And this of course violates the natural rights we have as parents to be able to educate our children. Paragraph 2333 of the catechism says, “Parents have the first responsibility for the education of their children.” The Second Vatican Council says, “Parents who have the primary and inalienable right and duty to educate their children must enjoy true liberty in their choice of schools.” Now, when the Second Vatican Council published this document in 1965 homeschooling was really, really rare. You could hardly find anyone who was homeschooling. Now, homeschooling has become a burgeoning movement. I mean, a lot of us are doing de facto homeschooling at home. If you sent your child to school and the school is closed, you’re kind of doing homeschooling, but not really.
Here’s my advice, don’t replicate government run education at home. Get advice from your homeschooling friends on the internet to set something else up, but people are trying to educate children at home now and I’m concerned that people like Bartholet are going to say, “See, look at how the bad experience these children had while they were at home. We need to make sure all kids are in government schools.” No, they had a bad experience because you tried to replicate government education, which doesn’t work very well, and studies consistently show that. Do you try to replicate it at home with hours long Zoom calls? My wife was telling me she knew someone who was told that her kindergarten teacher was telling the parents, “Just make sure you do four hours of instruction a day with your kindergartner.” I mean, that is ludicrous. It is ludicrous to do. We do the basic instruction that my five-year-old requires and right now he’s actually excelling beyond kindergarten level. He’s getting into first grade reading, first grade math because we’re able to meet him where his needs are at.
And so there’s going to be examples of course of homeschooling gone awry, just as I’m going to show you here. There are examples of government run education gone awry. So Bartholet, what’s her example to say that homeschooling is so bad? Well, she cites this memoir by Tara Westover called Educated. Tara Westover was raised in a homeschooling family, or you might call an alleged homeschooling family, in Idaho, and she writes in her book about how it just didn’t prepare her for when she actually got to college. It didn’t prepare her when she actually got to college.
Here’s an excerpt from, I think it’s from the book, it’s an article in Time Magazine, and this is what she said, “American history was held in an auditorium named for the prophet Joseph Smith”, so she went to Brigham Young University, BYU, “I thought American history would be easy because dad had taught us about the founding fathers. I knew all about Washington, Jefferson, Madison, but the professor barely mentioned them at all. He instead talked about “philosophical underpinnings”, and the writings of Cicero and Hume, names I’d never heard, in the first lecture we were told that the next class would begin with a quiz on the readings. For two days, I tried to wrestle meaning from the textbook’s dense passages, but terms like civic humanism and the Scottish enlightenment dotted the page like black holes, sucking all the other words into them. I took the quiz and missed every question.”
Now, I’ll give her this, this is good pros, it’s good writing, but it’s not a good argument against homeschooling. It shouldn’t be representative because, guess what? If you asked high school students that came out of government-run high schools, do you think any of them could tell you what civic humanism is or the Scottish enlightenment? I doubt that. So what boggles me about Bartholet’s article, and you can read my whole take down of it at catholic.com, it’s called Defending the Right to Educate our Children, I’ll leave a link to it here in the show description at TrentHornPodcast.com where you should become a premium subscriber, if you haven’t already. Or at the very least leave a review at iTunes or Google Play. In the article, I talk about how Bartholet’s arguments against homeschooling don’t work because she tries to show where there are some deficiencies among homeschoolers, but her same arguments could be inverted to say that there ought to be a presumptive ban on government education of students because government-run schools, there are so many horror stories. And what I talked about, that isn’t even what my experience in the school was, there was deficiency.
I remember once I was in the fourth grade and I was the only student in class who got the multiplication tables and figured it out so the teacher asked me to go to the front of the class and teach the rest of the students. And he went back to his desk and started working on something. So I didn’t even get paid. It was in the fourth grade.
So you can see that government-run education … Now, what I went through was … I mean, it was annoying and deficient, but not some of the horror stories that you see. But a lot of these schools, they just don’t prepare our students. So if Bartholet is concerned about homeschoolers not being prepared to be good citizens in society, which by the way, when you look at the surveys, by the way, homeschoolers do better on standardized testing, there’s a study that’s come out to show that actually they’re more tolerant of those who disagree with them. One recent study showed that “Homeschoolers, they have more willingness to extend civil liberties to people who hold views with which one disagrees.” So that contradicts Bartholet’s assertion that they’re not going to be able to promote an open minded democracy and pluralism in our society because they’re raised in this narrow, rigid homeschool mentality. And that’s not actually the case.
Though, ironically, in government-run schools, they’re narrow and rigid as well. You have students who are kicked out of class because they say that there are only two genders. Here’s an example of that. This is a 17-year-old Scottish high school student who was removed from his classroom for asserting that there are only two genders and he’s being told “No, the national government, the curriculum says this, you are not allowed to disagree. You’re not allowed to espouse that view here in this classroom.” And this was a year ago in June of 2019.
Speaker 4:
I think it’s silly to have anything other than two genders.
Speaker 5:
That, okay-
Speaker 4:
Anything else?
Speaker 5:
Could you please keep that opinion to your own house? Thank you. Not in-
Speaker 4:
So you got to put your opinion out in class and my opinion-
Speaker 5:
Well, I am not putting-
Speaker 4:
My opinion has to stay inside the classroom-
Speaker 5:
I am not putting my opinion, I am not putting my opinion out. I am stating what is national school authority policy. Okay?
Speaker 4:
Well, it’s not scientific whatsoever. You don’t have to kick me out of class.
Speaker 5:
I’m sorry-
Speaker 4:
[inaudible 00:17:08] waste of my time where I could have been done revising, doing something else. Instead, I state something I believe in and you kick me out of class for 30 minutes and I’m waiting on-
Speaker 5:
Okay, take [inaudible 00:17:16] you can make an official complaint.
Speaker 4:
I’m not going to make an official complaint.
Speaker 5:
Why not?
Speaker 4:
I just think it’s-
Speaker 5:
I know what you think and I know what the authority thinks, I know what the authority’s point of view [inaudible 00:17:27] it’s very clear, very clear that we make no discrimination on the grounds of various-
Speaker 4:
I wasn’t making discrimination. I’m simply saying there are two genders, male and female.
Speaker 5:
Yeah?
Speaker 4:
Anything else is a personal-
TH:
There is what the authority believes and then what you are allowed to believe. And what’s ironic of all of this is that the “authority” does a terrible job when it comes to equipping students. So Bartholet’s concerned that we need to have a presumptive ban on homeschooling because maybe homeschoolers are not prepared like Tara Westover, but when you look at standardized testing, when you look at the metrics for homeschoolers, they do better than students who go to government-run schools. And so I talk about that in the article, but I want to play with you another clip. This is from an old ABC 2020 piece called Stupid in America by John Stossel where he does an investigative report on government-run schools to show that they are failing our students. This is something we should all be aware of, they’re failing our students and not preparing students to be civic minded people because they leave school and they barely know anything. So here’s a clip from that, that I think is very instructive to avoid the … Sorry about the pun.
John Stossel:
Most Americans don’t know what stupid schools are doing to American kids. We gave parts of an international test to some high school students in Belgium and in New Jersey.
Speaker 7:
Answer the questions to the best of your ability.
John Stossel:
What did Belgian kids think?
Speaker 8:
Considering the tests we usually get here, this was kind of piece of cake.
Speaker 9:
It’s very easy.
John Stossel:
The New Jersey kids were also confident. How was the test? Easy? Hard?
Speaker 10:
It was actually pretty easy.
Speaker 11:
I think I did good.
John Stossel:
They have reason to be confident. New Jersey students in general test above average and these kids attend an above average New Jersey school, but the Belgian kids cleaned their clocks.
John Stossel:
They got 76% correct. You got 47% correct.
Speaker 12:
I’m shocked because it just shows how much more advanced they are compared to us.
John Stossel:
This boy got the highest score among the Americans but didn’t come close to the top scoring Belgian.
Speaker 13:
The test was so easy. I think if the kids in America couldn’t do this they’re really stupid.
TH:
I’ll play the rest of the clip here in a sec, but I just want to make clear by the way that I am not bashing people who send their children to “public schools” or who are teachers in these schools. I’m just saying that parents have the right to determine what is the best education option for their child because they are in the position, parents and caretakers are in the position to know this child most intimately and to determine what is going to be best for him or her. And that may be a “public school”, private school, homeschool, co-op or homeschooling. We know people who have gone through the homeschooling option, then went to government-run schools, then back and then to private schools. My point is it ought to be parents ought to have the right to be able to decide that. And like I said, there are people in government-run schools … I originally was going to become a history teacher. That was my first career goal when I was leaving high school. I said I want to become a history teacher because I had an amazing history teacher in high school, and that history teacher in high school, he changed my life. He made me want to be a teacher.
Now, I do think I still am a teacher. I teach the faith to people and I love that. And so there are amazing teachers out there in government-run schools, but the problem is odds of a child coming into contact with one of those teachers or that outweighing the bad they may come across, including the other things in government-run schools like promoting same-sex behavior, transgender identity, promoting promiscuity, pornography … Up in Orange County for example, the government runs schools there forbade, they prohibited parents from pulling their children from sex education classes that talked about transgender or homosexuality, so that is what I am concerned about. And then I’m also concerned about saying this double standard and the argument, homeschoolers, it’s a deficient thing, we need government to teach people. When you leave it up to government, the results are lacking.
John Stossel:
Stupid? Really? Jay Leno’s routines make you think it’s true.
Jay Leno:
And what state holds the Kentucky Derby every year? Think about it.
John Stossel:
The tonight show says these are not staked, these are their real answers.
Speaker 15:
Kansas.
Speaker 16:
[inaudible 00:21:42] book war and?
Speaker 17:
And sex.
Speaker 16:
War and sex.
Jay Leno:
What is the Bill of Rights? We’re going to lunch [inaudible 00:21:52]. Bill of rights, okay? What’s the purpose of the Bill of Rights?
Speaker 18:
I don’t know.
Jay Leno:
What was the major cause of the Civil War?
Speaker 18:
I don’t know.
John Stossel:
American high school kids are beaten on the international tests, not just by kids from Belgium, but by kids from most countries, even poorer ones like Poland, the Czech Republic, South Korea.
So are American students stupid?
Speaker 8:
No, we’re not stupid, but we just … we can do better.
Speaker 9:
I think it has to be something with the school because I don’t think we’re super lower than them.
John Stossel:
Right, something with the school because the longer kids spend in American schools, the worst they do.
TH:
And what Stossel goes on to say is that when you compare students in government-run schools, they actually track with students in East Asian countries and other countries like in second grade and fourth grade, but by the time you get to eighth grade and 12th grade, they fall significantly further behind. So once again, I’m not attacking the parents. We’re trying to make the best decision for their child to send a child to a government run school or the great teachers that we do have there. I am attacking the idea that all children ought to be sent to these schools and that parents don’t have the right to determine the educational trajectory of their children. This goes all the way back to the 1920s when Oregon tried to pass a compulsory school law to outlaw home education. There wasn’t really a lot of formal homeschooling then, but to outlaw private schools, outlaw parochial schools and say that all students have to be educated in government run schools. It went all the way to the Supreme Court. It was the Little Sisters case versus Oregon, Little Sisters versus Pierce, and the Supreme Court in the United States said that the child is not the mere creature of the state. It is parents who have the right to educate their children.
And Pope Pius the 11th quoted that decision in Divini Illius Magistri where he quoted this US Supreme Court saying “Parents have the right to educate their children because the child is not the mere creature of the state.” And Pope Pius the 11th was concerned with socialist states at that time that said, no, the state is the one who ought to be educating children, ought to be educating people. I mean people like Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, they wanted a mandatory government schooling angle said the care and education of children should become a public affair, that they wanted to abolish the family itself.
They wanted to destroy the family and replace it with government being a communal family for everyone so that you, your ties to every other citizen in society is equal and there’s no one you’re more obligated to. So not like family members come first. You have an obligation to provide for them. Rather, we’re all just the same interconnected cogs in one big socialist machine. So Pope Pius the 11th spoke of socialist countries that were doing this through mandatory government education, compulsory government education, not allowing private education or anything like that. He said “There is a country where the children are actually being torn from the bosom of the family to be formed, or to speak more accurately, to be deformed and depraved in godless schools and associations to irreligion and hatred according to the theories of advanced socialism. And thus is renewed in a real and more terrible manner, the slaughter of the innocence.” You tell them Pope Pius the 11th. You tell them. So that’s first, the right to educate our children, that we have to be vigilant about to be able to protect.
The other one is the right to worship. And not just the right to have faith, not just the right to have a particular religion or have particular kind of beliefs or the right to be able to pray at home, but the right to be able to join together in communal worship. Now when this all started, when COVID-19 started, I was one of the first to say that in principle it can be justified to suspend the celebration of public masses if there is a health order. This happened during the black plagues and Charles Borromeo did this during the Spanish flu celebration of public worship services was suspended. So I’m okay with it in principle if it is done fairly and across the board, but my problem is when you say that religious organizations are treated differently than nonreligious organizations. Or now I don’t like this idea that there are essential services and non essential services, who gets to decide what is essential or non-essential? For people of faith, religion is essential. The people will say, “Well, essential services are those things that you will die without.” I think essential services should be those things that you are willing to die for.
So I just don’t understand when I’m driving around town, why Baskin Robbins is open and there’s groups of people in there looking at the ice cream behind the counter, liquor stores are open, marijuana dispensaries are open, abortion clinics, facilities are open, but churches are not open. So that’s where I’m getting more and more skeptical that people are using the lockdown to promote a prejudice against religion. So you see this in Las Cruces, New Mexico, for example, Bishop Baldacchino, the diocese of Las Cruces was one of the first bishops to publicly come forward and talk about resuming mass. It says in this article from Angeles News, the Bishop announced April 15th that public masses and sacramental life in his diocese, including weddings and funerals, would resume even while observing state public health rules that prohibit indoor gatherings of more than five people. So he’s celebrating mass and they’re only letting five people be in a church. And I just don’t understand, there’s some people who are worked up about this. The governor of New Mexico said, “Well, you have the right to do that, but I don’t know why you would in the midst of this pandemic.” She’s worried about five people in a giant church when they’re allowing five people in the toy department at Target at any time to be able to do that. Are toys an essential service, but being able to go to mass are not?
And I love what the Bishop said, he said, “You look around us right now in this country and what do you see? People are dying of this terrible disease but also of despair. There are reports of increased suicides, crises of addiction, violence in the homes. This is a moment of total darkness for many. We must bring the light of Christ into this darkness. We cannot close ourselves off. Closeness in this moment is the one thing forbidden and yet this is what we are called as priests to be ,close to our people.” So I would encourage you to find any way you can to celebrate public worship and resume it in a safe way possible.
One way that I think is completely safe and ought to be allowed and should not be illegal … To me it would be anti-religious bigotry to outlaw this, and those are drive-in worship services where you had people in their cars listening on FM radio or live streaming on their phones in their cars with the windows rolled up in the church parking lot as masses being celebrated. Now, the state of California, surprise, surprise had outlawed this, but the state actually buckled after a lawsuit was filed. This came off in Fresno and resulted in changes in San Bernardino County and Riverside County. It says here “California churches will now be allowed to offer drive-in church services during the COVID-19 outbreak. The decision was made as a result of the Center for American Liberties lawsuit and request for a temporary restraining order. This policy change comes hours after governor Newsome and attorney general Bacara responded to the restraining order. In their response to the governor and attorney general both agreed that since cars are technology, drive-in church services should be allowed under the state’s shelter in place rule.”
So, like I said, it’s a start. For a lot of places, we’d not be able to worship inside of a church, even though the government is allowing similar kind of commerce and activities in places that have higher traffic populations, higher density of consumers in them. So I think it should be allowed. And even if you can only do a drive-in worship service, you came to have communion, it’s a start. If we don’t do anything, if don’t try to make any kind of move whatsoever … Freedom is not voluntarily given. It’s something we have to fight for. And I’m not saying fight in a violent way, I’m saying you can assert freedom. So like what I did for example, is I called the San Diego police department where my parish is located and I called them and said, “Look, if we did a drive-in worship service, would that be appropriate or will we get arrested? We won’t do it if it violates shelter and place order, but can we do that?” And the dispatcher there said, “No, we’re not going to be doing calls on people who are engaging in religious services if you’re all in your cars and the windows are rolled up and no one’s congregating together. There’s no reason for us to come out.”
So I would encourage you, try to brainstorm what’s the most creative way and safe way that you can celebrate the sacraments. Even if you have to start little by little, you eat an elephant one bite at a time. We have to start little by little to that return to normalcy. So put the plan into action. Call your local police department. I tried calling the San Diego County department of public health. That was a giant waste of my time. Sometimes I’m worried that our freedoms will go away by something that I call the tyranny of bureaucracy.
There is a wonderful Terry Gilliam movie from years ago called Brazil. It’s a dystopian science fiction film based on a world that … It’s dystopian, it’s authoritarian, but the real thing that ends up crushing people’s freedom is just useless bureaucracy. I think there’s a scene where a guy literally drowns and paperwork and dies. So it’s like if we have our freedoms, like “Oh, call the County department of public health” and I can’t get through to anybody and no one can give me a straight answer about whether this is appropriate, so I said, you know what, I’m going to call the police. If it’s illegal they can tell me whether I should do it or not do it. If the police can’t tell me if it’s legal or not, then obviously it’s something that’s very silly in that regard. They should be able to tell me and that’s what they told me.
So I would encourage you, call them, say, can we do this? And if they say yes, go and get a record of the call, get a reference number for the call, get the name of the officer or the dispatcher you spoke with, keep a record of that and celebrate. And then if people try to cite you later, say “We called you guys, we talked to you, we have it all right here.” If they say no, if you call them and say, no, you can’t do that, then I would say consider taking legal action. There are many nonprofit law firms, Thomas Moore law center, others that will take up your cause.
In a lot of places, the state is not eagerly going to move forward to allow us to publicly worship again because they think that religion … I think a lot of them, it’s not even that religion is nonessential. I think some of them secretly enjoy the fact that a lot of people can’t go to church right now. I mean I see this on social media, on Twitter all the time. There are people who will say, “I love the lockdowns. I love that the churches are empty now”, atheists that are crowing about this. So that’s why I believe we should assertively fight for our freedoms. You don’t have to go and get arrested for this. Just call the police, ask for permission. They say no, go to a local law firm and file a report, file a lawsuit. I’m sure they’ll do it on your behalf and I think you have a good chance of winning in that regard.
So I didn’t get a chance to get to right to peaceably assemble because this episode went on longer than I thought it would. I might cover that in a future episode here, but thank you guys. Once again let’s, above all, let’s just keep praying for this pandemic to end. Don’t give up on the power of prayer and don’t get sucked in the idea this is merely a human problem, a medical problem. It is that, but pray for the pandemic to end. Pray for the restoration of public worship and pray for those … A lot of people are suffering right now. And if you are suffering, offer that suffering up on behalf of others who are victims of domestic violence, who are victims of child abuse, people who have economic fallout, for those people who are standing in line six hours a day at the food bank, and people who are sick and people who are dying alone in hospitals with no one around them. There’s a lot of suffering here, but we have a God of mercy, of love, who’s all powerful, all knowing and all good, who can bring any good from any evil that we observe. And one way we can do that is that we offer up our own suffering so that God, through ways known only to him, can, through his grace, comfort those and give grace to those who are suffering during this time. So let’s trust in him.
Sirach two, four through six, my favorite Bible verse, “Accept whatever be falls you; in crushing misfortune be patient, for in fire gold is tested. The worthy man put in the crucible of humiliation.” Trust in God, make straight your ways, hope in him, and stand up for our rights, especially the right to worship the true God and the right to educate our children and teach them about the one true God. So thank you all so much and I hope that you have a very pleasant day.
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