Trump’s Attorney General Pick, William Barr, Blamed ‘Secular Government’ For Many Ills
Donald Trump’s latest pick for the position of attorney general, William Barr, seems to have not been fully vetted, because his history suggests that like the president’s last pick, Matthew Whitaker, Barr doesn’t believe in the separation of church and state.
The Daily Beast says that in past speeches, Whitaker had stated that any picks for the Supreme Court needed to be Christian, and Barr wrote an essay back in 1995 for a publication called The Catholic Lawyer which talked about the role of God in law and in daily morality.
“[American government should impose] a transcendent moral order with objective standards of right and wrong that… flows from God’s eternal law.”
Barr insisted a return to “traditional values” would rid the country of crime, sexually transmitted diseases and more, and believes that government should subsidize religious education, particularly mentioning the funding of Catholic schools which he says will curb homosexuality and non-marital sex.
Barr wrote that the United States went off the rail in the ’60s.
“The American government was predicated precisely on [the] Judeo-Christian system” that “flows from God’s eternal law. But since the 1960s, the state no longer sees itself as a moral institution, but a secular one.”
Barr continued, saying that, through legislation, our country’s morals were eroding, and it was the fault of the “secularists.”
“Through legislative action, litigation, or judicial interpretation, secularists continually seek to eliminate laws that reflect’ traditional moral norms. Decades ago, we saw the barriers to divorce eliminated. Twenty years ago, we saw the laws against abortion swept away. Today, we are seeing the constant chipping away at laws designed to restrain sexual immorality, obscenity, or euthanasia.”
Patheos states that Barr clearly rejects a separation of church and state, which should exclude him from holding the top legal post in the land. William Barr has stated that Roe v. Wade was “wrongly decided” and that women don’t have a constitutional right to abortion.
In 2011, Barr gave a speech condemning public schools for the lack of religious instruction and prayer in schools.
“This moral lobotomy of public schools has been based on extremist notions of separation of church and state or on theories of moral relativism which reject the notion that there are standards of rights or wrong to which the community can demand adherence.”
As recently as 2017, Barr spoke about LGBT rights as just one more form of the breakdown of morality as “special interest” groups were demanding equal rights on the Georgetown University campus, a Catholic-based school.