Elizabeth Johnston and Kirk Cameron Photo: Screenshot
Kirk Cameron went on an unhinged rant this week, claiming that public schools turn kids into drag queens, strippers, and drug dealers.
The former teen actor and anti-LGBTQ+ Christian author and advocate joined Conservative Christian author Elizabeth Johnston on her eponymous podcast Tuesday to talk about the so-called “woke mind virus” and its “radical attack on family values.”
Keep track of the ongoing battle against bias and for equality with our newsletter.
Johnston went on to ask Cameron about his crusade to “expose” children’s book publisher Scholastic Books’ supposed “agenda to sexualize our children.” Late last year, the actor announced a partnership with SkyTree Book Fairs, a recently launched 501c3 not-for-profit organization that aims to provide an alternative to Scholastic Book Fairs, which it has characterized as promoting “sexualized content.”
As Book Riot noted in November, the emergence of SkyTree roughly coincided with the disappearance from the website of Cameron’s for-profit publisher Brave Books of information about booking its own book fairs, and former Brave Books head of finance and administration Riley Lee now serves as SkyTree’s head of book fairs. Brave Books has also promoted SkyTree Book Fairs via its social media accounts, and according to Texas Freedom to Read co-founder Frank Strong, SkyTree “appears to be primarily a distribution vehicle for Brave Books.”
While Cameron has previously accused Scholastic of “pushing sexualized and gender-confusing content for minors into schools and libraries,” on Johnston’s show, he declined to talk about Scholastic beyond calling the publisher “wicked,” instead launching into a bizarre attack on public schools.
“What I think is more productive is to say, ‘What are we doing to contribute to the demoralization of our children and the disintegration of our culture,” Cameron said, positing that across the country, “Parents are complaining that their girls are coming home strippers and their boys are drug dealers.”
“And then we find out, well, how is this happening? Well, all of us are paying to send them to schools that teach them how to be strippers and drug dealers,” he added without evidence. “We’re sending our kids to public schools where they’re learning how to hate God, they’re learning how to hate the country, they’re learning how to adopt a set of values that calls good evil and evil good, and boys can be girls and girls can be boys.”
Cameron argued that conservative Christian parents need to “replace” public school curricula “with a set of values that leads to health and success.”
“Here’s the deal: Whoever wants the next generation the most is going to get them, and if you will tell the stories to the children, you will shape their ideas of what is good and evil,” Cameron continued. “But if we outsource our parenting because it’s easier or we believe the lie that we’re not qualified experts to educate our kids, so we have to — we have to subcontract our parenting and discipleship out to the government, we’re gonna have little kids that come back as little Marxists, little statists, little atheists, drag queens, strippers, drug dealers, and… you name it.”
Cameron, an advocate for homeschooling and private schools, encouraged parents to “pull your kids out of the schools that are teaching your kids bad things and put them into places that teach them good things.”
Cameron’s comments sparked outrage on social media, after author and “Friendly Atheist” blogger Hemant Mehta posted a clip from his conversation with Johnston on X.
On Wednesday, Cameron fired back, claiming that his comments were “taken out of context,” but adding that he was glad the topic was tending on social media.
“As I talk more about in my new book Born To Be Brave, the problems of our struggling culture can be traced back to disengaged parenting and turning away from God,” Cameron wrote. “The only solution is turning back to God and parents fiercely guarding our children’s academic, spiritual, and emotional learning.”
He continued his attack on schools, writing that “sending our children to public school for education is like sending them to a candy store for nutrition. Parents, you are your children’s best advocate, teacher and guide; no government program can replace you.”
While taken out of context, I’m glad this is topic trending on X. As I talk more about in my new book Born To Be Brave, the problems of our struggling culture can be traced back to disengaged parenting and turning away from God. The only solution is turning back to God and… https://t.co/jtWOvclSWm
The actor’s crusade against public schools is indicative of the broader effort on the right to demonize public education, making it a culture war battleground in recent years. Efforts by Republican lawmakers and Christian conservatives to mischaracterize public schools as sites of liberal “indoctrination” and “grooming” have fueled the broader conservative goal of promoting scholarship tax credits and school voucher programs that funnel taxpayer money away from public schools and into private institutions. Critics say these programs are effectively efforts to defund public education.
