Barr rails against 'militantly secularist' public schools in 1st speech since leaving Justice Department

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Former AG Barr rails against public schools' 'secular progressive orthodoxy'

Bill Barr gives first public speech since leaving Justice Department. Fox News contributors Ben Domenech and Rachel Campos-Duffy react.

Former Attorney General Bill Barr, in his first speech since leaving the Justice Department, railed against what he called the "secular progressive orthodoxy through government-run schools," and questioned the constitutionality of funding such public institutions, during an event in Florida on Thursday.

"The time has come to admit that the approach of giving militantly secularist government schools a monopoly over publicly funded education has become a disaster," Barr said in Naples. Fox News' "The Story" first obtained the video.

Barr said public schools have become totally incompatible with traditional Christianity and other major religions in the U.S., and therefore, "it may no longer be fair, practical or even constitutional to provide publicly funded education solely through the vehicle of state-funded schools."

He made the remarks at the Council for National Policy’s annual gathering, where he was receiving an award from the Alliance Defending Freedom.

The former attorney general also pointed to an Iowa school's week of Black Lives Matter curricula, a plan that had forced the school on defense, saying the goal was to "promote focusing on our Black students."

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Separately, Barr said he'd seen school materials which told children that everyone could choose whether they were male, female or neither. "This is not established science," he said, but rather the "moral, psychological, metaphysical dogma of the new orthodoxy."

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The former attorney general said these ideas were relatively unheard of in the U.S. until recently, but have become fully instituted in many public school systems.

Barr called such ideas "a broadsided attack on natural law."

Barr also took a shot at former President Obama for "waltzing into Washington," and enrolling his daughters in the prestigious private school Sidwell Friends, while at the same time eliminating a scholarship for needy kids in Washington.

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On the subject of Critical Race Theory, Barr called it "Marxism substituting race for class antagonism."

"It’s monstrous of the state to indoctrinate students into alternate belief systems," he added.