Former U.S. Attorney General Ken Starr said Tuesday on Newsmax TV that his new book, “Religious Freedom in Crisis: Defending Your Faith in an Age of Uncertainty,” examines “the hostility to religious traditions” in today’s society.
Former independent U.S. Attorney Ken Starr said Tuesday, April 13, on Newsmax TV that his new book, Religious Freedom in Crisis: Defending Your Faith in an Age of Uncertainty, is a study of “the hostility to religious traditions” in today’s society.
In his National Report article, Starr said, “So many governors have decided, for whatever reason or motive, to crack down on religious worship in the church. The most egregious was New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D). He has limited attendance at events in certain parts of the city to no more than 10 people. This is effectively a restriction on house church activities. The governor of California is also trying to restrict house churches, and they’re all doing it in the name of public health.”
He went on to say, “They’re going too far. But the good news is that this is good news for all of us, and it makes us stand up and be brave and fight for our religious freedom. The U.S. Supreme Court has been very aggressive and consistent in its claims for religious freedom. (Today’s) culture has become quite hostile to religious liberty …… The purpose of my book is to give people, pastors, a weapon (to defend freedom of faith) to stand up and say ‘no’, which is the power given to us by the Constitution. That’s not just my personal view, it’s been the view of the U.S. Supreme Court for decades, including Justice Ruth Ginsburg’s.”
When asked by the TV host what “cultural hostility to religious freedom” meant, Starr said, for example, “That’s when we see opposition to Catholic groups banning employees from distributing contraceptives; when we see Philadelphia ending the Catholic Church’s services to the community, including the placement of foster children services that have been going on in Philadelphia for more than a century; when we see bakers or servers being challenged in different states because in good conscience they don’t want to make a certain kind of specialty cake.”
He went on to say, “These things never happened 20 years ago, but now they are happening every day because of the hostility of some people. I call it a secular view that is hostile to religious traditions …… Here, we don’t talk about cultic variant views, we only talk about mainstream Christian views, Orthodox Jewish views, Islamic views. In the whole social arena, do we have to participate in the celebration of homosexuality? They obviously have a constitutional right to do so, recognized by the Supreme Court, but don’t we have the freedom to defend our own conscience? That’s the key point I argue in the book.”
Referring to two recent videos seen online (one taking place in England and the other in Canada) in which police tried to stop a religious service being conducted at a church, Starr argued that it was dangerous. “The good thing is that the U.S. Constitution is against any similar enforcement by police, but we have to be prepared to not just say I’m against it, or that’s not what I meant. As citizens, we can say, I live in the land of the free and you are breaking the law by trying to take my freedom away from my church. What I’m doing is constitutional and is permitted by the U.S. Supreme Court.” Starr said.
Finally, Starr said today’s culture may be against people believing in God, but the Supreme Court and the Constitution so far are pro-freedom of belief ….. “The Supreme Court operates so effectively that it doesn’t matter whether certain people agree with a decision or not. The American people will express their determination to defend religious liberty through their legislators in Congress.”
Note: Justice Ken Starr was famous between 1994 and 2000 for his appointment to investigate former President Clinton’s Whitewater Scandal and unearth the Clinton-Lewinsky sex scandal.
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