The Real Scoop on "Separation of Church and State"
Why did Americans ever think there was a "wall of separation" between religion and government in America? Do recent religious freedom victories leave America open to sharia law or other forms of Islamization? Religious freedom lawyer Kelly Shackelford of the First Liberty Institute explains the myths people have been fed for decades and why the legal situation for Christian believers today is so actually stronger than at any time in living memory. Watch every episode ad-free on members.charliekirk.com! Get new merch at charliekirkstore.com!Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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All right, everybody, welcome to this special long-form interview with Kelly Shackelford, who's the president and CEO of First Liberty Institute.
That's firstliberty.org.
Kelly, you were a really close friend of Charlie's.
You've been on this show many times, and it's an honor to have you in the studio because oftentimes we'd have you and it would be breaking news about something that was going on with the Supreme Court or some case that you were working that our audience needed to know about.
You're here on campus at Turning Point USA.
You're visiting and you're supporting the mission that the organization that Charlie built and this legacy that we're all trying to move forward.
And I just want to say welcome.
It's an honor to have you and we're grateful for you continuing this mission with us.
Well, it's a privilege to be a part.
I've been so proud of what you guys have done since the tragedy, the assassination.
And I look back at Charlie and I probably text or talk maybe once a month or so.
And I just was looking back at some of them.
And there was one that was like, you did it.
You won.
And I was like, what was this?
And it was a big Supreme Court case.
And just nobody, there will never be anybody like Charlie Kirk.
He's once in a generation and maybe once in more than that.
And an incredible loss.
And I still get sad as I think of things.
But I know he would be so proud of what is happening and what you guys are doing and what the Lord is doing with this horrible tragedy.
And so kudos to you guys for carrying on the mission in an incredible way.
Thank you for saying that.
And you are in a very small group of people that Charlie would look to for legal advice and especially understanding the Supreme Court religious liberty.
And, you know, you have a long history with this show.
We haven't had you on for a while.
And I was like, Kelly, we got to do this.
And so I'm glad we have the time and the schedule.
And you're, and by the way, thank you for those kind words.
I mean, we're doing our best here, you know, and but we have a sacred duty.
We really do to continue on.
I never wanted to be a public figure.
I never had any desire to be.
This was sort of thrust on all of us.
I know for Mikey and Blake, I mean, all of us are just kind of trying our best to keep the flame of liberty burning.
And I mean, that's what you're doing, though.
And so sometimes our mission in life and our calling in life is thrust upon us.
And sometimes we just have to say, yes, Lord, here I am.
Send me.
And so I think that's kind of what we're all doing because we love this country and we love what the Lord is doing right now.
We love the outpouring of this revival that's happening.
Bible sales spiking.
CPUSA faith is growing.
Our campus programming is growing like leaps and bounds.
So there's a lot of good things happening.
And you said something when we were meeting before this that it really took me by surprise and it caught my attention, and that is that you make the statement that there is more religious liberty in this country than at any other time in our nation's history.
Explain what you mean by that.
Yeah, everybody alive right now has more religious freedom than they've ever had in their life.
And that's because of the recent decisions.
And let me give a little feel for how unusual this is.
Typically, there's about 7,000 requests to the Supreme Court to take your case, and they took 56 last year.
So if three or four years ago, our goal had been for them to take one of our cases, that would be a pretty heady goal, right?
Well, they didn't take one.
They didn't take three, two, they didn't take three.
We won four religious liberty cases in 13 months.
And three of these were, I would call, landmark, like shifting 50 years of case law.
And so the Carson case, which was out of Maine, where they said, and Charlie, we talked about these, by the way, at the time, but you just don't put all this together.
For 130 years, they've said, parents, you get to pick whatever school you want, public or private, because most of their school districts don't have public schools.
Just take your voucher money and go, right?
And then they decided to make one change, but you can't pick in religious schools.
And Supreme Court said six to three.
Unconscious.
They decided that originally.
The legislature.
They got advice.
Yeah.
They got advice from their attorney.
It's like 20-something years ago that, oh, this would violate separation of church and state if you treat the Christian people the same as you do.
Everybody.
Well, and that was a huge landmark because now you can take that to any Christian, Catholic school.
Yes.
What this means is every school choice program in the country now and everyone in the future.
So think about since then, Texas has now just passed a school choice program.
From now on, you can never tell a parent that they can't pick the religious, the Christian school.
That's huge.
That's going to really impact a lot of kids, a lot of education.
I mean, 85% of the private schools are religious schools.
Yeah, of course.
So this is huge.
So that was victory number one.
Victory number two was a case on religious freedom in the workplace.
And there, what happened is we had a client who was came off the mission field and wanted to work somewhere where he didn't have to work on the Sabbath.
Strong beliefs on that.
So he went to work for the U.S. Postal Service.
And that worked fine for two years until Amazon started delivering on Sunday.
And all of a sudden, they said, look, we were going to have to force you to work on Sunday.
And he said, I'll work double shifts.
I'll do whatever else, but I can't do that.
You need to accommodate my schedule.
Well, there's a strong law protecting religious freedom in the workplace.
But 47 years ago, in a very dishonest case, the Supreme Court reinterpreted all the words to make it meaningless.
And so the Postal Service knew they could just cut him loose.
So we went to the Supreme Court.
We did something a little different than we would normally do there.
We said to the court, this decision from 47 years ago was a lie then, and it's a lie now.
You know that this is not what these words mean.
The court ruled 9-0 in our favor and restored that standard of religious freedom.
I mean, you have other cases here that I want to get to because you have been, I mean, you are the preeminent group working on religious liberty.
And beyond that, you're just a legal scholar, an expert on this stuff, and we will continue to consult you as these cases come up.
But I want to dive in a little deeper because you mentioned the separation of church and state.
Yes.
And this is, of course, taken from the 1802 letter, Danbury Baptist Association from Thomas Jefferson, where he said a wall of separation between church and state to express his belief that government should not interfere with religious freedom.
Now, let's go back to what he was probably really saying.
In 1802, America was 100% Christian, essentially, right?
For all intents and purposes.
Catholic, Christian, whatever.
So our founders were often concerned with we don't want, you know, the Presbyterians or the Anglicans or whatever taking control of becoming the state religion.
Yes.
Right.
And so that's that.
But this is not in the Constitution.
This is not in the Declaration of Independence.
And yet we have turned it into this almost mythology of America that there is a separation of church and state.
Now, in practice, obviously we know that that's impractical.
It's not possible because all legislation, all policy is an extension of morality.
It's a codification of a moral precept, which comes, of course, oftentimes.
Sometimes it comes from academia, but oftentimes, and historically, it comes from our faith, our Christian beliefs in this country.
So maybe just explain why this has become so insidious, this idea of separation in church and state, and what is true and what is not legally.
Yeah, well, number one, it's not in the Constitution, right?
I mean, what does the Constitution say?
The Constitution, this is the First Amendment, the first two clauses, said that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
The founders did not want us to establish a national church.
They experienced that in England.
They didn't want that here.
But what happened 50 years ago in a case called Lemon, it's Lemon B. Kurtzman, is they reinterpreted the establishment clause.
And they said, well, we don't think it means just not establishing a national church or denomination.
We think it goes further than that.
And what it really means is anywhere that government is, religion can't be.
I mean, that's kind of a separation of church and state.
They use words like separation of church and state.
And normally you can't bring a lawsuit if you're offended.
That's not a basis.
But they start allowing lawsuits if you're offended by religion.
So if you wonder why nativity scenes were taken down across the country and menorah is at Hanukkah and Ten Commandments were rolled into the closet and all that, it's not because any of that is in the Constitution.
The founders would be appalled.
It's because of this Lemon case.
And it was cited over 7,000 times in the last 50 years to put down religious expression in public.
So like nativity scenes.
Nativity scenes, Ten Commandments.
You know, if some sort of religious activity occurs at school, even by a student, everybody's in a panic.
And all that's protected.
And so we've been trying to get rid of it because we knew it really created a government that's hostile to religion, which is not what the founders wanted.
They don't want the government to put their thumb on the scale in favor of one religion over another and never coercion by government.
But the idea that the government can't be pro-religion in general is ridiculous.
I mean, it would strike down the free exercise clause.
That's pro-religion.
And so we finally got to the Coach Kennedy case, which was the third of those cases I was just mentioning.
And of course, Coach is a guy who was told he got out of the Marines after 20 years.
He went coaching.
He made a promise to God that after every game, the first thing he would do, everybody's in center field.
They're making reservations for dinner after the game.
The first thing he would do is go to a knee and for 15 seconds, thank God for the privilege of coaching those young men.
And he did it for seven years until the school came to him and said, if you do that again, we're going to fire you.
And, you know, he's like, what did I fight for if I'm not going to stand up?
And what kind of example am I to these boys if I run as soon as somebody shoots at me?
And so he went to a knee and they fired him.
And unfortunately for him and for us, he lives outside of Seattle, so not exactly sympathetic courts.
And for seven and a half years, he lost.
But we finally made it to the Supreme Court and they ruled in our favor.
This was the first time, by the way, Andrew, that there had ever been a case at the Supreme Court on the rights of teachers or coaches with regard to their faith.
Huge victory, free speech, free exercise.
Coaches and teachers do not give up their First Amendment rights.
And that's what most people know.
What they don't know was within that decision, they overturned the Lemon case.
Wow.
7,000 citations.
What year was this again?
This is like a trend.
This was, yeah, like three years ago.
Three years ago.
And as of three years ago, because of the success that you guys had at First Liberty Institute, what is now the precedent that has been set?
The precedent, the new test is if there's a religious activity and it's occurring around or in government, if it's a part of our history, if it's consistent with our history and our traditions as a country, it's presumptively constitutional.
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So I want to dive into this because this is something you and I were talking about before, and I think it's really important.
Okay, so Charlie, in the last months of his life, was raising the alarm bell about Islam.
He was worried.
He was seeing Epic City and Texas, Dearborn, Michigan.
You see Soron Mamdani.
And, you know, you saw that debate clip between him and Andrew Cuomo, where he essentially guilted him and shamed him, saying that you don't know the mosques that you've visited.
And so it shocked the nation outside at least New York City because it's like, oh, all of a sudden, in order to be a mayoral candidate at a big city in America, now you have to go service this new population.
Historically, there is no doubt, there is no argument that historically America has been a Christian nation, whether that be Baptists or Quakers or Anglicans or Catholics or, and you could make the case for the, there's been a Jewish presence in the country for a historical president.
So at what point, because the pushback would be like, okay, so we have more religious freedom now than we've ever had.
That's good.
Obviously, as a Christian, I want to be able to express my religious freedom.
But what is good for the goose is then good for the gander.
And now we have a rising population of Islam, of Muslims in this country.
And so what rights do they now have if it now has to fit within this other precedent of historical consistency?
Well, you know, first, people will ask a lot of times because we have synagogue cases across the country just wanting to be synagogues and they're being persecuted.
It's ridiculous that this is happening in the United States.
And they'll say, well, what about religious freedom for Muslims?
And they say, I'm worried about that.
And I always say religious freedom to do what?
That's what you got to look at.
To do what?
To pray?
Sure.
To put Sharia law in?
No.
And so take the Texas.
They built that hope.
They were trying to build that community out in Texas.
It was easily taken care of by law in Texas.
In fact, what they were doing in excluding others and doing that type of an effort probably violates securities laws.
And the attorney general is now beginning to do a securities lawsuit against them for what they were trying to do.
So I say, and it reminds me a little bit, gosh, I don't know how many, maybe 30 years ago, 25 years ago, when Bible clubs and schools became a thing and people tried to stop it.
It went all the way to the Supreme Court.
I guess in the 1980s.
And there was a great victory for religious freedom in that, yeah, you can't allow clubs at school and then exclude the Christian club or the Bible club.
And people would come to me and they would say, if we allow these Bible clubs, they're going to allow Satan clubs.
They have to allow them too, you know, because of religious freedom.
And I would say, you know, our kids say they'd love to know who they are.
Let it happen and let's see who wins.
And, you know, 10 years later, there were 33,000 Bible clubs in public schools.
And there really weren't much of the others.
Now, I know the Muslim community is more organized, but I really think the truth always wins over the darkness.
So if somebody's trying to do something and change our country, I mean, there's not a Muslim country in the world that you can find that really has religious freedom.
The reason we have religious freedom in this country, even for people who disagree with Christians, is because of the JAO Christian belief that a relationship between you and God is between you and God, and the government has no right to come in between that.
And I think that will win out.
Yeah, the sunlight.
Listen, I love the glass half-full interpretation of that.
But, you know, it's an immigration.
It's a function of immigration.
Absolutely.
The more that we import people that happen to be Muslim, the more that they're going to exercise politically their political rights, and they're going to try and leverage that.
You saw that with Zora Amdani and Andrew Cuomo.
The more that they're going to try and form communities where they get to express a cultural norm that we would not consider traditionally American.
So that's kind of the basis of my question.
So you're saying that it has to be consistent with a historic norm, right?
Yes.
So at what point does something become considered historic?
Because if I'm their lawyers and I find myself in a case, I'll be like, well, we've had Muslims in New York since, you know, this date.
Of course it's historic.
Well, not in any practice.
It's the predominant way.
It's what they're asking to do.
Well, so we have this Muslim call to prayer, right?
And there was actually a clip of this.
I think I actually have this.
So we've got, bear with me for one second here, Kelly.
I want to make sure I get these clips right because these are striking.
And here we go.
So this is the Dearborn police chief, Shaheen, on the Islamic calls to prayer blasting five times starting at sunrise daily.
Play cut 210.
Oftentimes when we take readings, Council President, it's the ambient noise that's even louder than the call to prayer, to be honest with you.
The truck will go by hit a pot wall, and it's much louder than the call to prayer.
The two or three evaluations that we have had in the last couple years have been met with compliance as soon as we've talked to the religious institutions.
It's no different than church bells that you might hear on Sunday.
So you got that, and then you've got this guy, Mehdi Hassan, who actually comes by way of the UK.
He was an MSNBC anchor, and now he's just basically a troublemaker and a provocateur.
Play cut 212.
I think that if you can play church bells, you can pray the call to prayer.
We are as American as anyone else, and don't take any BS from any.
Okay, so this is going to be their argument now as the population of Muslims increases in the country while we continue to issue 1.2 million green cards every year.
And a lot of those are coming from Muslim countries.
And now, even increasingly, if we get people immigrating from Europe, they might be Muslims.
So the point is, They're going to assert their religious freedoms because this is a country historically that has exercised a broad view of what religious freedom is.
But you're saying there's a historical precedent.
So, I'm just, again, I'm playing devil's advocate a little bit here, which is a terrible expression, by the way, to use in a religious freedom discussion.
But so, if they come in and they start saying, well, you know, it's no different than church bells, and you come in and you say, well, it has to be consistent with historic precedent.
Is there a sense of what you would look at it and say, well, because this nation is historically Christian or Catholic, that would you would have broader freedoms in those respects to exercise certain religious freedoms than you would if they want to start doing Sharia law or if they want to start doing genital mutilation, if they want to start doing just Muslim call to prayer?
Yeah, I think it wouldn't be based upon the religion, it would be based on the practice.
What kind of practices were allowed?
So, in other words, if a Christian can pray, you know, somebody could say, Well, the history was most of the prayers are Christians, so the Jews can't pray.
Well, no, no.
The whole idea was they were praying, right?
And I think the situation here with calls to prayer, that's a noise issue, right?
I mean, if the idea was that, well, we don't want them to be able to send an email to their friends and tell them to come to prayer, well, we'll allow the Christians to do it, but not the Muslims.
Well, we wouldn't say that, right?
This is a noise issue.
And if the noise is really violating and disturbing people, they need to control it with noise.
Now, the things that people are really concerned about, like creating Sharia law and things like this, those would never be allowed or consistent with our constitution in this country.
So those things would take away freedoms.
And those things, so you always have to ask yourself, what is the religious practice that they're asking for?
And is it consistent with our history and tradition if the government is involved?
If not, is it just something that is, you know, we would want to protect for all faiths?
Because that's really what the religious freedoms is about.
Yeah, I mean, in this Muslim call to prayer, when they start congregating in certain municipalities like they have in Dearborn, that's going to be an increasing issue because that's something that they demand.
They demand these five times a day prayers.
They all have to point towards Mecca and they get on their prayer mats.
And it's, you know, and I think at some level, for a lot of us, you know, it's just simply offensive because, A, we believe that, you know, and you don't have to chime in here.
This can be me.
But it's offensive because, you know, we love our culture.
We love the American Christian heritage that we have, that we inherited from England and from, you know, the Magna Carta and, you know, all the way back, the Black Road Regimen, the revivals that gave birth to American liberty.
And we hold these things dear.
And so we don't want to hear Muslim calls to prayer in our neighborhoods.
I don't want my kids to have to go to school and be taught how to be respectful to this other culture that I didn't have to grow up with, but all of a sudden they decided to move here.
And when you also think about the fact that they have 50 Muslim-majority, 50-plus Muslim-majority nations on planet Earth that they could move to, why are you insisting on moving to the West that is Christian?
Even if we're not, you know, everybody's going to church on Sunday, this is, in our turns of phrases, our rules, our norms, our customs, the holidays that we celebrate.
This is a Christian nation.
It still is.
And we're seeing this great revival.
We do not want to have to listen to the call of prayer.
And I understand you have a different challenge as a lawyer to sort of interpret the laws and the statutes on the books.
But what are the statutes on the books or what is lacking that would help protect and insulate our culture from, I would say an increasingly hostile force that wants to assert cultural dominance on Americans and the West.
Yeah, I think the idea of what you can do about different religions that would come in and really aren't religions.
They're more government and culture.
They don't assimilate.
That's problem number one.
Any religion that comes into the United States, it doesn't want to simulate.
That's the whole purpose of the United States is assimilation.
It's the melting pot, not creating a new government from some other source.
And so I think the issue there is not the religious freedom side.
the immigration and who we're allowing in and making sure that we are the united states that we we have a certain history and tradition and approach and we love diversity if they're coming here for the ideals of america freedom um but i will say i will say we don't have we don't have a problem with ethnic diversity necessarily right We have a problem with cultural diversity.
Now, it's not to say that I don't love my Italian grandmother's cannolis.
That's not what I'm saying.
Obviously, there's certain things, but if you expect to come here into this country and you expect to then matriculate your son or daughter into my kids' school, and now we have to make a carve-out for Muslim prayer five times a day that impacts my child's learning experience,
or they have to now be educated on how to be incorporated into that experience, much like we've seen candidly with the secular cult of LGBTQ plus whatever, as Charlie always called the alphabet mafia.
I mean, that was a coercive force.
It still is in many schools.
And you've had experience.
Actually, I want to play one of these cuts from yours.
I want to talk about that case.
But this is an insidious cultural coercive force that, you know, we have to, yes, the immigration is key, and I totally agree with that.
We've been hitting that hard for a long time on this show.
You know, we're doing 1.2 million green cards a year, and we don't vet for American values.
We don't vet for anything like that because we're a bunch of suckers and we get taken advantage of.
And my argument is like, can we, at least as a first step, go back to pre-1990 Immigration Act with George H.W. Bush, which took it from 500,000 green cards a year to 1.2 million?
We do not need the state of Montana every year in this country or the state of Arkansas every three years in this country with legal immigrants, especially as AI is coming.
I mean, we're already seeing Amazon has just announced they're going to probably cut about 600,000 jobs and replace them with robots over the next couple of years.
I mean, so this is coming.
We do not need this level of immigration, but the cultural implications are unavoidable, right?
And so I totally agree.
Yes, let's deal with the immigration thing first, but we already have a problem that's here, or at least a potential conflicts of interest that are here.
And you see that with the Mehdi Hassan clip.
So I'm just trying to drill down on this piece of do we have more because we have more precedent historically?
Do we have more freedoms?
Do we have more rights to this than there's going to be more practices that are more consistent with the Judeo-Christian heritage or the founding that are going to be laid in that are not going to, that wouldn't be part of history tradition from other religions.
They're not going to be.
So they're not going to be automatically presumptively.
Now, again, what we're talking about here, though, is not practices of individuals.
It's when you involve the government.
That's what the whole issue with Coach Kennedy's case and this idea of you're not doing the lemon approach where, oh, you're on government grounds.
Well, gosh, you can't do any of this religious stuff.
They said, no, no, as long as it's part of our tradition.
Now, I say all this.
We're about to argue a case at the Supreme Court in less than two months over whether you have a right to share your faith in a public park.
So you begin to wonder sometimes we begin to lose who we are as a country, but I feel good and I'm very hopeful we'll win that case.
But so that's different.
But let's go to religious freedom itself, not with on the government lawn or whatever else.
I really believe that religious freedom wins out.
It's kind of like free speech.
If somebody's saying something you don't agree with, the answer is not for the government to stop the other.
It's let's speak the truth, right?
And it's the same way with religious freedom.
Especially as a Christian, I believe, man, you allow there to be freedom.
I think that I have the truth and the Holy Spirit on my side, and you got no chance on the other side, right?
So that's what I want.
So that's one of the beautiful things about the Coach Kennedy case is all these things that we haven't been allowed to do that's created almost a naked public square, right?
We should be, I mean, I love the fact that we can have a nativity scene at Christmas on the government lawn.
We can have a menorah for Hanukkah.
And we begin to remember those moral and religious roots of our country.
And it's not the sort of naked public square like we're moving into Marxism or something.
We actually have a different mindset that actually thinks there is truth, that is not about, you know, the oppressed versus the oppressor.
It's a very different.
It's every person is valuable in the eyes of God.
You know, all those principles start to flood back into our country.
But when we remove those from the public arena, we began to lose those.
When you push the Ten Commandments in the closet and you do all these things, which is why I love, if you've seen a number of states are now passing laws, they're putting up Ten Commandments posters in their schools and they're teaching about these things as part of our history and traditions and the beginning of our laws and our thoughts in our country.
That'll really change us, I think, long term.
And I would much rather have that approach that allows for more freedom, even if there's some things that maybe people don't like.
As long as they're not infringing other people's freedoms, they're welcome to go.
What if you could make the argument that the Muslim call to prayer five times a day is infringing on my freedom not to have to hear it?
Although they would say the same thing about church bells, which is objectively a beautiful thing to hear.
I mean, you know, I mean, I would argue that even Muslims would think, you know, oh, that's a nice sounding tone.
Or maybe they don't.
Maybe that's just a trendy thing.
I think they'll have to have neutral on that.
I think they'll have to have a neutral law, whatever it is, right?
If it's a noise level, if it's the number of times a day, something, I mean, people, there is a right somewhat, I mean, you would want to make that a right in your community to not be disrupted by sounds all day, right?
I mean, it would be miserable if you were right next to one of these places and you couldn't do your business.
Of course.
No, of course.
But those laws would have to be objective.
It couldn't be, well, this religion can't do it in this religion.
Well, I don't think that's going to be a very satisfying answer for somebody.
I understand that you are bound by the laws and you have to work within a legal construct.
So this is not pointed at you.
I understand you're kind of helping me navigate through what's possible, what's not.
But I think you're right.
I mean, ultimately, this is a cultural issue that starts with immigration.
Absolutely.
And that's what we're going to have to get to.
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People don't just post, they respond.
They build on each other's ideas.
You'll see a teacher simplifying a tough lesson so it finally clicks, or a gardener sharing a trick that saved their crop.
But what matters most isn't the video.
It's what comes next.
Someone asking a question, someone else answering with a story of their own.
And suddenly, people who've never met become a community built on curiosity.
When people listen and understand, a shift happens.
Walls come down.
Ideas travel further, and connection, real connection, takes their place.
That's what listening does.
It reminds us that we're not as different as we may think.
And that's what makes TikTok so powerful.
It's a place where every post can turn into a conversation, and every conversation can make a difference.
Portions of our program are sponsored in part by TikTok.
Now, I want to pivot somewhat to this.
So the president has formed a commission, a religious liberty commission.
Yes.
Tell us about that because you are directly involved in that.
It's the first time it's ever been done in the United States.
Commissions generally report to an agency or department or something, and I think they send a report and it disappears in the back of some room.
This one's really different.
The charter of the commission is specifically to report directly and only to the president of the United States.
And we have to do this by July 4th of our 250th, which is the 250th celebration of religious freedom and the freedom of our country.
And our job is to give him direct recommendations on what he can do to secure religious freedom for the future of our country.
And so we're holding hearings and we're hearing testimony.
I think most people are shocked when they hear what's going on around the country.
And we're coming up with some recommendations.
And I have no doubt with this president that our recommendations will not be executed.
You told me some crazy stories.
Let's start with the woman that got a teacher that got fired for having a cross at her desk.
Yeah, she's this is still going on.
It's in Connecticut.
Marisol Castro.
She's a wonderful woman, 33 years teaching.
And if you could see the pictures, you know, if you see it online, they've got a desk and they've got a little wall behind them that's their personal wall.
They put their stuff on there.
And, you know, it's up in Connecticut.
There's Yankees banners.
There's Yodas.
There's all kinds of stuff.
I mean, you could put a gay pride flag if you wanted, but there's one thing that's not allowed.
She has a little cross.
It's not that big.
It's a little cross in the midst of all those personal things.
So principal, vice principal, everybody comes flooding into her room saying, you take that down.
And she's very intimidated by this.
You know, she's scared.
And they say, I'll tell you what, we'll let you put it under your desk.
And they had her mount it under her desk.
There's literally a verse for this.
Like, don't put it under a bushel.
Like, you know, it's like.
No, you're right.
You're exactly.
Because she goes home.
We have these images, so the studio is going to put them up in just a second.
Gosh, she looks like such a sweetheart.
I'm just looking at this.
Show a picture of this woman.
Her name's what?
Marissa?
Marissa.
Marisol Castro.
Marisau Castro.
Marisol Castro.
Marisol Castro.
And then go to 264.
This is the picture of the cross in question.
You can see it.
It's just like, so where she would sit, it's almost just down to her right side.
And that was a violation.
But they told her to put it under her desk, like on the side inside, under her desk.
She did.
There is a picture of that.
Yeah, there's a picture of that too.
And she, you know, she was intimidated.
All these bosses come in, and so she goes home and just starts weeping.
And as she says, as she always prays to Papa God, she said, Papa God, I failed you.
And when I go back tomorrow, I'm going to do it right.
I'm putting the cross back up.
And she went back, and you can see that cross under the desk.
She pulled it off the desk.
She put it back up on her board.
And Walked her out of the school with all of her stuff in a box like a criminal.
And they're still refusing to back down.
And again, think of, oh, separation of church and state.
It's like, look at the Coach Kennedy opinion.
Okay.
The whole argument they were making there was, well, the kids might see him pray.
It's like, and the Supreme Court said, so.
Yeah.
You know, I mean, he could wear a dress, but you can't watch him pray.
Of course he could pray.
And so there's nothing wrong with a teacher being a person of faith, having a cross around their neck, whatever.
That's part of life.
And it's like they haven't even, they can't even read the Supreme Court decision.
They have.
We've sent it to them.
This is the hostility that goes on to teachers, to kids, to parents around the country that we have to fight every day all over the country.
Yeah, I mean, and then there's this, I mean, she's just such a sweetheart.
I hope, I mean, it sounds like you guys already should have dealt with this with the Lemon case where you got that reverse with Coach Kennedy.
All of this should take care of it, but we're fighting.
We have one of the biggest law firms in the world joined us against this school district, but they're refusing to back down.
And so we're still in court.
And, you know, if people, I will say this, they could go to the Religious Liberty Commission and watch any of the past hearings.
They're really fascinating.
I would encourage people to do that.
And her testimony, which is about four to five minutes long, it was spellbound.
I mean, it had the whole place, hundreds and hundreds of people with their mouth open, just floored.
In fact, I didn't see a woman in the room who didn't have a tissue.
It was really powerful.
She spoke from her heart.
Talking about, you know, I failed you, Papa Guy.
I mean, oh, that's gut-wrenching to just hear you even say that because you know that her faith was so sincere that she knew not to hide her faith or let them persecute her.
And so she felt guilty.
I'm so proud of her as a brother in Christ.
Like, God bless her.
And you know what?
Like, that's not the type of teachers we want for our family.
Of course.
These are the people that you do want leading our children, not the ones that are doing hand signs to their neck in Nathan Hale Elementary, Lucy Martinez, that still hasn't been fired as of this recording, at least.
And so we're hoping that that happens.
And by the way, you know, some people are like, oh, well, you know, they're upset that we're saying, hey, if you celebrated Charlie Kirk's murder, that you should not be employed to teach our school at our schools, whether that be K-8 or it be a university like Illinois State, where there was a teacher's assistant who tried to flip over one of the tables of our kids that were tabling out in the square.
And that teaching assistant has been fired by Illinois State University.
God bless them.
And, you know, here's another Illinois example.
And this Lucy Martinez should be fired because you failed a fundamental decency test.
I call it life's pop quiz.
You know, you got, it's like, how do you find out the quality of the water in a glass?
Well, and it gets bumped.
It spills out.
And you find out what's inside.
Is it going to poison you?
Is it clean?
Is it whatever?
Well, she got bumped, and what spilled out was vile garbage.
And I'm sorry, but that reveals character.
You are not fit to be around students.
And so some people are like, well, you can't call on for these people to get fired.
And I'm like, well, listen, just because you're upset that somebody's going to lose their job for something.
Well, guess what?
Charlie lost his life for it.
So don't give me that.
Sometimes there are consequences for your actions.
And this should be one of those examples.
Celebrating anybody's death is unacceptable.
Totally.
There's got to be a line.
It doesn't matter who you are.
It's unacceptable in any job in this country.
1,000%.
I mean, we, you know, that should be automatic.
Especially somebody as good and wonderful and as decent.
I understand people have different algorithms and they get fed all of this stuff, which is why we've made it a point on the show to just debunk these out-of-context clips or the divorce from the argument that preceded it for 15 minutes.
And they take one little snippet and these people go around saying Charlie was a bigot or misogynist or something.
It's infuriating.
There's another story, however, that I wanted to get to because you had told me about it.
I actually still haven't seen the clip, but apparently it went viral.
So you guys are having this commission, and it's a hearing.
Yeah, it's a hearing.
Maybe paint the scene because this young man ended up wowing everybody.
Yeah, it's we that one was the day the that day was on the rights of students at public schools and the rights of parents.
So we heard some gut-wrenching stories.
I mean, a mom who had her daughter transitioned behind her back and they were keeping her in the dark.
And it's just horrible stuff you're hearing.
But the president shows up, and out of all the people that are going to testify, he picks one person.
And the person he picked is when he was 12 at this hearing, but he was 11 when this happened.
This is in Encinitas, California.
They forced in this school all the fifth graders to read a book called My Shadow is Pink to their kindergarten buddies.
Right.
So they, so this happens in my kids' school, too, where the older kid has a buddy.
Yes.
And they go through maybe a couple years together.
Maybe this was just a one-off at this school, but yeah, my daughter has this where she was three or four years older, and they kind of have a big buddy.
And so this kid was a fifth grade, 11, right?
He's going to be a big buddy to a kindergartner.
That's right.
And his job was to kind of shepherd him through the process, be a mentor, big friend, big brother.
And he gets asked to read a book about LGBT whatever.
And I think asking him to ask this little kindergartner to question their gender and to take out a paper and draw on it to show what gender they are.
So this, you know, little Shay is just a heart of gold.
And he said, I can't do that to my kindergarten buddy.
And he and another child there both went home to their parents and told them.
And the parents went to the school and said, you know, you need to be notifying the parents if you're doing something like this.
And number two, we need an exemption for our child because this would violate their faith.
The school answered, you have no right to be notified.
And we are giving no exemptions.
You know the mindset.
Well, you religious people are backwards and we have to show you how you should believe about transgenderism and all these things.
So now we end up going to federal court and we did win that it is a violation of the Constitution to not notify parents about something like this.
And you do have to provide a religious exemption.
The school, by the way, because these kids stood up, I mean, these are 11-year-olds, had a pink out the hate day to have them bullied.
Bully them.
Yes.
Yeah.
And so here we are at this hearing, and there's all these people testifying, grown-ups and everybody.
And the president calls out one person to come up to his podium, and it's Shay.
And it's the coolest thing if you watch it.
I agree.
We got the clip.
Number one, Shay could barely, I mean, it's a presidential podium, like his eyes would be barely above it.
So they have this big stool that they bring out so he can get up there.
And then he walks up to that.
And the president first comments, he has a red tie.
It looks just like what Trump wears.
He said, I love your tie.
And he gets up.
They pull the microphone way down for him.
And this kid, 12 years old, gives, you would think he's a 55-year-old professional speaker.
It was unbelievable.
He said he gave a minute.
I got a 37 second clip.
So hopefully we didn't cut out any of the good stuff.
But it sounds like it was a minute of just pure fire.
So good for Shay.
And here we'll play the clip 255.
When I was in fifth grade, my school forced me to teach my kindergarten buddy about changing his gender using a book called My Shadow is Pink.
The book said you can choose your gender based on feelings instead of how God made us.
I knew this was not right, but I was afraid of getting in trouble.
After my family spoke up, the school treated us badly, and kids started bullying me and my brother because of our faith.
And the school did nothing to stop it.
It hurt a lot, but I kept trusting God.
I believe kids like me should be able to live on faith at school without being forced to go against what we believe.
I hope no other family has to go through what mine did.
Thank you.
Just unbelievable.
Just that a 12-year-old kid can even deliver us.
And plus, I mean, you don't, you see him.
You don't see the cameras filling the walls, the room full of all these adults, the president of the United States.
Standing behind him.
And you're at the presidential podium, and he just killed it.
He totally did.
What a great young man.
What a really cool young man.
And the testimony of he and his mom, which came after the president left, where they sat, it was about five minutes, was one of the most touching things you've ever seen, too, because his mom started breaking down at times.
And here's this 12-year-old.
He would lean over and hug and support his mom.
And they were going back and forth saying things.
It was so powerful.
But it just, this should not happen, right?
And so that's why we're holding the hearings is because we want this information out.
We want people to know that this is not right.
This is against the Constitution.
And that we're going to come up with specific things that can be done to.
Can you, I mean, I don't want to put the cart before the horse here.
I know that you have a July 4th, 2026 deadline to get these recommendations to the president.
But just explore in general, what are some of the things, what are the levers that the president can pull, and how do we make some of this stuff permanent?
Well, number one, there are obvious things he can do immediately.
So, for instance, we've had Department of Education guidelines for years on religious freedom in the schools to try to help schools because there's a lot of confusion.
They're updating those.
Obviously, it'll have some of the more recent good victories, like the Coach Kennedy case, as well as the Mahmood decision that came this summer on the rights of parents over their kids in the schools.
Is that notification of in Mahmood?
They were forcing all the parents.
And this is one of those unique things.
You had Jewish parents, Muslim parents, Christian parents all together.
Well, there is some common ground with the Muslim community when it comes to parental notifications and not wanting their kids to get trans.
I mean, so there are areas where we can cooperate.
There's no doubt.
Absolutely.
And that was a huge victory in favor of parents.
They do have a right to be notified about this kind of stuff.
There is religious freedom protection.
By the way, our case I mentioned with Shea, this school district has now appealed it to the Ninth Circuit.
Of course they have.
So they haven't given up yet.
But the point is, all this is going to be, and I think in this new Department of Education guidelines that will be released.
Well, my proposal, if I can get the rest of the commissioners on the commission to agree, and I think they seemed agreeable, is I think every school district who receives federal money, which is every school district, should have to certify that they've used these guidelines and they've trained all of their administrators, all of their teachers, so that they understand the religious freedoms or parental rights that the people in their district have.
And then number two.
Well, and if they don't.
That's right.
If they don't and they refuse, pull the funding.
I mean, why should we ever give funding to a school district that is violating the United States Constitution?
And so if they are, and we gave, you saw examples like Coach Kennedy and others, who even after they won their lawsuit, the persecution continued.
They still were trying to violate the constituents.
At that point, to me, they're doing it intentionally, and they should have all their money yanked away.
Totally.
And really what should happen is the people in those communities that elect them should say, why are you costing us all this money?
Yeah.
I mean, that's, and it doesn't happen very often, to be honest.
I've been doing this a long time, 37 years.
And these school districts that do horrific things and that we nail them in lawsuits, it's like the community is not even aware.
Honestly, some of these places are so far gone, you pull their money and they'll be like, you know, good for you, you're fighting back.
And they'll be like, tax me harder, daddy.
Like, that's, I mean, honestly, that's what's going to happen in some of them.
And you know what?
Listen, they'll live with higher tax rates.
Good for them.
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So I want to end this conversation on kind of a question of judicial history.
Because one of the things we were talking about is that the courts really went wayward during the 50s, 60s, 70s.
And, you know, now the liberals are freaking out because there's a 6-3 majority of Republican appointees.
We lose Amy Comey Barrett sometimes, and if Kavanaugh goes wayward, Justice Roberts goes wayward.
So it's a little tenuous, but we've got over your shoulder there, we've got Justice Clarence Thomas, a picture of him on the wall, and we've got Alito.
You know, Gorsuch has been pretty good.
So the question is, just walk us through, I mean, you know, the 20th century is a long time, but if you had to kind of put it into epics or eras of liberal courts, conservative courts, there really does appear to be something that got in the water after World War II.
And maybe it took a little while to kind of metastasize, but it was in the 50s, 60s, 70s, we really got a lot of these terrible rulings, whether it's abortion or religious liberty.
Just explain, give us a 30,000-foot view.
Well, really, what we're talking about is the 60s, right?
I mean, think of the hippies, the whole, you know, sexual revolution, all the stuff that really went against all the Judeo-Christian values that the country had.
And that, you know, what I always tell people, they go, how can these judges issue these opinions?
Like, they'll say, well, that's not what the statute says.
And I would tell them, how many pastors are not doing what the scripture says?
How many of them are reinterpreting what it says?
So why wouldn't you think the judges would do the same thing?
If they're getting loose with the truth, they're getting loose with the truth.
So you had a lot.
That's where Roe v. Wade came.
That's where a lot of these decisions, I mean, I don't care what your beliefs are about abortion.
Please read the Constitution and tell me where it is in there.
It's not in there.
Every dependency.
It's a umbrella of the right to kill.
It emanated out somehow in an invisible way.
It's not in there, okay?
So that was just totally dishonest.
And so you had a lot of these really bad decisions, including on religious freedom, on all the kind of values that the country was built upon.
It's just wild to me because, you know, I wasn't alive during the 60s.
I don't know when you were born, but you think about a country that was so Christian, right?
I mean, a lot of people don't know there was a religious revival that happened in the 50s.
That's when Billy Graham's tent revivals really kicked off.
The Catholics were surging in the 1950s.
And yet somehow, upon that cultural backdrop, you had this emergence of one of the most virulently liberal Supreme Courts.
And it's just, it kind of, you know.
And then what follows that is, this is the other thing, you talk about history, is you had a Democrat Party that was committed to picking people that would get to the results they wanted to get to, right?
So they seem to never miss with their Supreme Court picks.
Whereas the Republicans, they would put a Republican on and they would be good one time and bad the next, right?
And the reason for that is the Republicans weren't picking based upon a real analysis of the life of this person.
They would pick based upon, this is the way D.C. kind of works.
Oh, so-and-so is my friend.
Trust me, right?
You know, David Souter, for instance, right?
I mean, that's how that happened is, oh, no, very conservative.
Or I've asked them, they're really good.
Asking all that, I don't care if it's your mother.
I don't trust them when it comes to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court.
The question should be, they're 50 years old.
Show me the proof of who they are, right?
What have they been a member to?
What have they given money to?
What is their judicial philosophy that is actually lived out?
Are they willing to restrain themselves and not take power?
Are they willing to pay a price to do the right thing?
Those are the kind of questions you've got to ask.
And when you do, and what I would say is on the Republican side, everything shifted with the Harriet Myers nomination because it was another one of those.
She was a friend of President Bush's.
He really trusted her, and they picked her.
Well, she had no record to show anything.
So the base kind of finally said, I'm revolting.
And what ended up happening?
He pulled her, and they put a leado who had more of a track record of anybody that we had ever seen.
And they thought, well, he's not going to get through.
He flew right through.
Okay.
And so since then, it has all been about not what people say, but show me the proof.
And that is what is so dangerous because D.C. doesn't operate that way.
And so if you don't have a real pushback on these judges at this, especially Supreme Court, but even the Federal Court of Appeals, these are lifetime appointments.
Then you're going to end up with pushing friends because that's how everything works there.
Oh, so-and-so friends conservative.
I'll push them for this slot.
And nobody's, I'm telling you, Andrew, last time under the first Trump, the first nominees for Supreme Court, we had these people pushing these people, and we would go to the White House and say, have you read this opinion?
And we watched their hair light on fire.
Nobody had bothered to read the opinions that they had even written.
So that's the way they usually do it.
And we've got to make sure we stay with a new approach, which is who are they?
They've lived 50 years of life.
What is the proof of who they will be on the Supreme Court?
I mean, I bet if they looked at your life, Andrew, and they're trying to figure out what kind of, they would have a lot of proof points of who you are, where you stand, whether you're willing to do the right thing versus these people that hide for 50 years and then they show up and we're supposed to think, well, they're going to be really good.
Yeah, I mean, on that note, even when you said that, are they willing to pay a price for it?
And, you know, I remember when I first started working with Charlie eight years ago, it was something I had to contend with because I was living in Los Angeles at the time.
And, you know, I was like, well, listen, if I join up publicly with Charlie Kirk, there's going to be a price for that.
And ultimately, I decided, yeah, let's do it.
Like, I felt like the Lord was calling me to do it.
And when you make those kind of decisions in your life, where there's no hiding behind anything, where you have to come out and pick a side, that tells you a lot about a person.
It's hard to quantify, but it's a really important character proof point that you need to consider when you're picking these lifetime appointments.
And, you know, you're also working on this at the appellate court level and some of these district court levels.
So you guys have, I mean, I don't know what you can share, Kelly, but you guys have put together a war room of sorts to assess nominees at even the lower courts.
Tell us what you can about that.
We were tired of having to hope about nominees because, I mean, our job at First Liberty is protecting everybody's religious freedoms, right?
And, well, if you don't have good judges, they're not going to be protected.
That's a good point.
And so we were like, we've got to, and really the first time that really kind of flew in our face was when Trump was elected.
And we saw 132 judicial seats open, which is rare.
Obama had not kind of paid attention to his knitting.
And he left all these seats open.
And we were like, you know, this might be the best thing we can do for the future of religious freedom.
So we started putting a vetting division together because we thought information is good.
We'll provide information.
And we don't have, unlike everybody else, we're not pushing for a person.
We're just saying, here's the info.
Let's pick the best person.
And so we started that.
And how we are now, eight and a half years later, we have the most extensive vetting division in the country.
And it's not even close.
We have a whole team, a large team of people.
We also have very sophisticated AI experts in this area, all a part of the process to make sure that we know everything about everybody because it's too important to our freedoms.
And we just provide those so that ultimately the ultimate decision maker, the president, has the information to make good choices.
So that's our goal is, you know, in a way, I feel like my goal is, our goal as an organization, Eve, is to stand in front of the booth and say, my hand up saying nobody gets through who's not pro-religious freedom.
And if we get run over by a train sometime, then we'll get run over by the train.
But we're going to stand and do our job and make sure the information is provided so that people aren't surprised like we were for many years.
Well, it's been a great conversation.
I'm glad you're doing that.
And if you ever need any help getting people's attention with some of that information, please let me know because you're so right.
The judiciary is so critically important, not only to religious liberties, but all of our liberties.
And, you know, as the president has been the victim of this black robe tyranny, as we've seen, this is becoming more and more of an issue.
Even after the Supreme Court sort of limited some of these national injunctions, they're finding workarounds by using class actions and all this kind of stuff.
So please tell everybody how they can follow you, Kelly.
Your guys' great work at First Liberty Institute.
Well, I'd say one of the things is go to firstliberty.org, our website, and you'll see a little bit of the way down it says be an insider.
And if they sign up, every Friday, we try to send out an email that lists the four or five biggest actions of the week on religious freedom.
It might be a new lawsuit.
It might be a decision.
It might be some judges that went through.
But we try to keep everybody up to date so they can really know what's happening because most of the stuff will not appear in the middle of the day.
It's not headline news, but it affects your life.
So firstliberty.org and then Be an Insider is a great way.
Of course, we also have Twitter and Facebook and everything else that's out there that they can go and follow as well.
But I just really think so much of what's happened recently, we've been trained for 50 years about these religious freedoms that we supposedly don't have.
And because of these recent decisions, these wins, we flipped all that.
And most people have no idea what they can do now.
And so I just think people will get the information.
They're going to find out that there's a lot more they can do than they think and that can change their community.
And I hope they, you know, they even share that with other people because the more people that get emboldened, the more we'll take our country back to what it should be.
Awesome.
Well said.
God bless you.
Thank you.
And God bless First Liberty.
You guys are doing great work on behalf of the entire country, as on behalf of all us Christians and Jews.
