In this enlightening conversation, Priscilla Ron and Brad Bergford explore the intersection of law, education, and personal belief systems. Discover how recent legal battles continue to shape the policies impacting schools, families, and communities. The dialogue navigates topics such as the separation of church and state, the significance of state rights in education, and practical advice for parents seeking the best educational pathways for their children amidst shifting societal norms.
Welcome to Restoring Education in America with Priscilla Ron. She’s a master educator and author, leading the conversation to restore the American mind through wisdom, virtue, and truth.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, hello, everybody. Welcome to Restoring Education in America. I’m your host, Priscilla Ron, and I’m so excited that you decided to join the conversation today. We have kind of an unusual topic because I’ve been talking to educators, homeschool moms, policymakers, but today I’m bringing my special friend to the stage. He is an attorney. Hey, Brad, good to see you.
SPEAKER 02 :
Great to see you, Priscilla.
SPEAKER 03 :
Before we get into the conversation about some of these legal cases in education, I’m going to share your bio with our listeners. Brad is an attorney at Illumin Legal in Denver. His practice emphasizes litigation in the areas of First Amendment rights, employment law, medical malpractice, wrongful death, personal injury, commercial disputes, and contracts. He practices before state district courts, the Colorado Court of Appeals, the Federal District Court for the District of Colorado, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the United States Supreme Court. Brad is the past president of the Colorado chapter of the National Lawyers Association and of the Commission for the Protection of Constitutional Rights. He is also an allied attorney and a Blackstone fellow with Alliance Defending Freedom. Raised in Boulder County, Brad Bergford is a Colorado native. He and his wife have four grown children and five grandchildren. Brad and his wife love the Colorado outdoors, and he has a passion for fishing, hiking, and sports of all types. He also enjoys singing and playing the piano, which I’ve enjoyed your piano playing because we’re both on the worship team at Brave Church playing piano. So I don’t know how you do it all, how you have time to do it all.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, there’s a lot going on. I have a pretty active life and sleep. probably isn’t as high a priority for me as it should be.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, I’ve gotten to know your beautiful wife, Bree, and she’s so amazing and such a lovely person. And every time I see you, she’s there supporting you. And I think it’s just such a testament for what we want to see in our community. And I have so much respect for you as a fellow believer, as an attorney, but also just as a friend. And so I’m glad to have this conversation with you now. Um, Alliance Defending Freedom, a lot of people in the Christian and homeschool community know about Alliance Defending Freedom, but there are going to be some people who don’t know much about it. Can you just describe a little bit about what this organization does?
SPEAKER 02 :
Sure. Alliance Defending Freedom is a religious liberties and life related legal defense organization that takes on cases, um, involving constitutional rights. They take on cases primarily having to do with religious liberties, parental rights, speech rights, and they also provide funding for cases like that to the extent that they don’t take a case on, but they might provide grant funding for cases, which is something that they’re doing for me in a case right now.
SPEAKER 03 :
I’m pretty sure that they’ve been pretty busy since COVID. We’ve just seen a lot more parents active, going to school board meetings, seeing what their children are learning at school and realizing that a lot of their rights have been violated. I mean, we had schools that were shut down and I know even some private schools, Christian schools that were told by the governor, you can’t meet. I mean, even though the pot shops were open and the alcohol shops were open, you had to close the schools. Do parents have a right to say, I’m sending my child to a private school, the government can’t tell me I can’t send my child to a private school, even if there is a pandemic?
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, that’s a great question, and I’m not sure that there have been any cases on point in federal courts, which is where they’d most likely be brought. The government purported in Colorado, I’ll just talk about Colorado, the government purported to shut down all kinds of school, all kinds of church and worship related activities, health, fitness related activities at gyms. There’s a huge line of things that they shut down, as you noted. And as you also noted, they made sure that they kept open marijuana dispensaries and liquor stores. You know, one thing we always see, sometimes people say, well, you can’t legislate morality. Well, first of all, legislation always involves morality. The question is whose morality will be legislated. And that’s why people need to be involved in their political goings on from the standpoint of voting. So bare minimum, you should be educated and vote. If you’re not educated, become educated and vote and contribute to the society because there are many things that the people for whom you vote and for whom you don’t vote will be involved in the things that they will try to do. And they will involve your decision, your lives. They will do things like tell you you can’t take your kids to school even in a private setting if they believe that they have the political power to do so.
SPEAKER 03 :
So hypothetically speaking, if you’re a private Christian school and you believe in two genders, like no boys in girls’ sports, no biological boys in girls’ bathrooms, do you have a right to set up your school environment where it’s very traditional, where you only have a boys’ and girls’ bathroom? Are there laws that you have to comply with?
SPEAKER 02 :
I assume you’re talking about primary and secondary education, private Christian?
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes.
SPEAKER 02 :
So if the school is set up as a 501 nonprofit, and if it is set up in terms of its bylaws as a religious organization, it should be able to dictate that schools will be able to segregate children, especially when they’re in some state of undress. There’s a law that went into effect. Earlier this year, thank God, January of this year went into effect. And it’s a law that garnered a lot of attention in Colorado. And it said that you couldn’t keep children in separate quarters, either for sleeping or for changing, for restrooms and so forth, locker rooms. And that school, or that law rather, had a preliminary injunction imposed in response to lawsuits that were brought. that’s kind of the battle right now. You came right out of the box swinging about an issue that’s a hot button issue in Colorado and really all around the country.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, I think that has been an issue that has decided some elections in certain places. Like we looked in Virginia when Glenn Youngkin won. That was one of the hot topics was boys and girls sports. And there are a lot of folks trying to get… citizens initiatives on the ballot next year. And I think that’s probably the way it’s going to have to get on a ballot if it comes from all of us. So I would encourage people who are listening, if you care about this topic, make sure you sign these ballot initiatives. There’s three of them. Are you familiar with those three ballot initiatives?
SPEAKER 02 :
You know, I’ve heard of them. I don’t remember exactly. I don’t want to speak very directly on them because I don’t remember exactly what they’re all about. But I will say with respect to this bathroom issue that you raised, Jefferson County Schools is presently defending a case where a girl went on an overnight trip and was put into, I think, a sleeping arrangement that involved a boy in her sleeping arrangement, very close to her, whether it was a bunk bed or something similar. I don’t know exactly, but these issues are popping up all over the place. And one of the problems that parents have really have and what what people want to see is i think no matter where you fall on this issue as a political matter and as a matter of personal preference i think everyone would agree that parents have the right to make the decision and parents should be able to say well i don’t really want my girl sleeping in a bunk situation with uh boys at any age you know and so so one of the big issues that that people are fighting about is do parents get notification we took a case uh to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court denied cert, but we were asking for school districts to let parents know important issues surrounding, in that instance, gender identity and what the schools were doing to try to instill a gender identity perspective on 12-year-old girls.
SPEAKER 03 :
If you’re just tuning in, my special guest today is Brad Bergford. He is an attorney with Illumin Legal, and he is defending the First Amendment and religious freedom. You know, several years ago, they told us, as I’m a teacher in Denver Public Schools, that we needed to put our pronouns on everything. Put your pronouns on your email signature. Put your pronouns on your table tent. Put your pronouns on the placard with your name on it outside of your classroom door. And I never did any of that. And I didn’t receive any punishment for not doing it. You know, I was urged to do it. In fact, you know, Denver public schools had these people say, you know, this is why it’s important for you to put your pronouns to the point where you almost guilted us, but they even came into our schools and taught our students, all of them, how to use their pronouns. Hi, I’m so-and-so and my pronouns are before they started speaking to anybody. Um, I have not complied with this. Apparently, you know, again, this must be a freedom of speech thing because otherwise I would assume that the district would go after educators who don’t agree with putting their pronouns on everything. But from your perspective, you know, I’m assuming this is a freedom of speech. I could claim freedom of speech. I don’t want to do this. Is that correct? If they ever came after me, I could just say legally, you can’t force me to do this.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, that’s a question that I can’t actually answer. You know, you said from my perspective, and I hesitate to say it from my perspective, you know, I’ll tell you what, you know, if I’m the person making the decisions, I would, of course, I’m in favor of not compelling anybody’s speech. And as a general matter, certainly in that context, I mean, probably you could present me with a hypothetical that would cause me to think differently about that. But in the context of public school teachers or really any public employee, I don’t think that there’s a legitimate governmental interest. See, when you have fundamental constitutional rights being implicated, And if the government purports to infringe on those rights or restrict those rights, the government has to have a compelling interest in doing so. And the government has to do so through the least restrictive means possible to accomplish the compelling interests. And so I can’t understand the compelling governmental interest that there would be in you putting things like he, his, they, it, she, or zee, zur, zahs, or some other nonsense syllable behind your name to somehow indicate some sort of conformity with a political agenda that they would like you to comply with. Now, the other side of the issue will argue that there’s a compelling governmental interest because children are killing themselves over this. And I just have a very hard time buying the notion that a child would say, my teacher’s email address doesn’t have pronouns following it. Therefore, I’m going to kill myself. I don’t mean to be overly pedantic about it, but just the notion that that would ever happen is extremely, extremely nonsensical in my view. So if they don’t have a compelling interest, they don’t get to step two. That means they being the government. The government, I should say it, doesn’t get to step two, accomplishing a compelling governmental interest through the least restrictive means possible. I haven’t seen, I’ve heard all this talk about this is why children kill themselves. This is why fill in the blank type of children kill themselves. And There just isn’t empirical evidence to suggest any of that. These people make this stuff up. And if you’re making it up, I think it’s evidence. It should be ab initio understood that there is no compelling interest because it’s not even real. You can’t say there’s a compelling governmental interest in things that aren’t real.
SPEAKER 03 :
You know, when I think about these parents who have chosen to send their children to public school, because it’s expensive to pull your kids out and send them to a private school, or you may not feel like you are equipped to homeschool or you have to work. I mean, there’s all kinds of reasons why even conservative Christian parents send their children to public school. But with all of these lawsuits that are coming, that are being introduced in different states. Do you think we’re winning the fight, or would you say to parents, look, if you can pull your kids out, you’re not going to win this fight against the government with all of these things, the woke agenda, the pronouns, the trans conversation. I mean, what would you say?
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, the courts have been all over the map, literally and figuratively, on whether the schools can compel or restrict teachers use of pronouns for students and teachers use of pronouns for themselves. And really the ultimate answer will never be that the legal system will save me from this corrupt society. We need a society that’s not so corrupt. Courts have said that there’s no precedent to support, or at least there’s mixed precedent, but not strong precedent to support teachers’ pronoun usage, you know, or teachers determining their own pronoun usage. There have been settlements in favor of teachers who sued over school policies where the courts have said that the school policies are not neutral. But as for the question, what would I say? Well, the school systems all over the country and the academy are devoted devoted to communicating to children from the earliest possible age, meaning as soon as they get exposure to a child, they will take the opportunity to suggest to the child that he or she is not a he or she. They will say things like, what are your pronouns? when they get into that and the way that they explain these things in school, communicate that a boy might not be a boy. If Jeremy Bentham were commenting on this phenomenon, I am sure he would repeat his analysis in a separate context. Nonsense on stilts. This is absolutely contrary to reality. And to the extent that I could give advice about schools and how things are going. It isn’t as though if courts come out on the right side of the question, do teachers have to put pronouns in their email signature lines or do teachers have a choice to use preferred pronouns for children? If courts come out on the right side of all that, the schools are still so devoted and so infiltrated with people who are committed non-realists that I still don’t think public schools are, for most people, the best choice. I understand, like you do, that there are reasons to have your kids in public schools that might outweigh the reasons not to. But boy, if you can have them somewhere other than a place where they’re being told things that are simply empirically not true, then I would suggest that you do it, no matter where that place is.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, it sounds like states’ rights is in full effect, depending on where you live. If you’re fortunate to live in a place like Florida, where they’re very strong in protecting parental rights and standing up for parents and the family, that’s a great thing. I recently heard about… Texas, Texas passed a law SB 10 mandating the Ten Commandments can be displayed in all public classrooms using the King James version of all the versions, you know, the old one. While Governor Abbott intended to sign it, federal judges issued preliminary injunctions stopping implementation, leading to ongoing legal battles with the issue potentially heading back to the Supreme Court. So I guess it went to the Supreme Court and there’s an injunction because religious groups argued that it violates the First Amendment separation of church and state. Okay, let’s talk about that phrase, separation of church and state, because it’s been so misused. I could talk about it, but you’re the attorney, okay? So what does separation of church and state mean, Brad?
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, Priscilla, I know you well enough to know that you can talk about this subject with a great deal of intelligence, and you’re totally informed on it. But the phrase separation of church and state comes from a letter that Thomas Jefferson penned to the Danbury Baptists when the Danbury Baptists were questioning what the Constitution would mean for its ability to shield itself. This Danbury Baptist Association, I think, is what it might have been, but Danbury Baptists. can we shield ourselves from the state’s influence over our religious activities? And Thomas Jefferson wrote, yes, there will be a wall of separation between the church and the state, meaning the state cannot invade the church. It did not mean that the church cannot influence the state, that the church cannot be anywhere written about, talked about, heard about. It has to be silent and and, you know, out of sight, out of mind type of situation. It certainly was of no constitutional significance that Thomas Jefferson penned that term, you know, the wall of separation, which we have come to know as, you know, the separation of church and state, which was, you know, first appeared in 1947. You would think if it was such a central constitutional principle, it would have arisen prior to 1947 you know, 150 years after the founding of this country, more than that, and after the ratification of the Bill of Rights. So, yes, there was always an intention to, and by the way, Thomas Jefferson wasn’t even around for the Second Constitutional Congress where the Constitution was written. So he wasn’t necessarily the best example best source for us to to derive our um constitutional jurisprudence in our the phrases that are significant in that in that context although he’s much more qualified in that in that regard than you know anyone in this century so you know i i i don’t think anything he said is untrue i think the way that we’ve interpreted it and by we i mean the supreme court has interpreted it is is entirely inconsistent with the constitutional principle, not to mention with the principle that Thomas Jefferson elucidated to the Danbury Baptists.
SPEAKER 03 :
Very well said. I can see why you’re an excellent attorney. You know, when I look back at our history, I am a descendant of enslaved Africans and this topic around education access. And, you know, we look at Brown versus Board of Education, which is a case we all learned about in school. We talked about education. you know, things like separate but equal. And I’ve recently learned about Rosenwald schools where Rosenwald partnered with Booker T. Washington to build 5500 schools across the South to help educate freed blacks and to help them be on a trajectory where they had equal access to education. And I’m looking at the lay of the land, which is, you know, one of the reasons why I wrote my book Restoring Education in America, because it seemed like there was a time where all of our students were going to school and they were learning. And my dad went to segregated schools where all of his teachers were black and principals black, all the business owners were black. And he said to me, that’s all they knew. They didn’t know any different and they loved going to school and they were very active. My dad was in the glee club and he was the drum major. And so when I talked to people, In my dad’s generation, they loved their educational experience because the culture was very warm. The teachers were invested in them. And then we had that, here we go, Brown versus Board of Education, where we had forced integration. um you know now look at where we are now and i’ve been teaching for 32 years and we have a generation of students who don’t like going to school we see still an education gap economic gap all of these gaps in in learning um what where where has the government gone wrong or did i just answer my own question because i said the government right government schools Are we not delivering on an equal access to education for all of our students in America?
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, that’s a huge question, and that’s the big question that so many people are trying to answer, you know, that we have made a commitment in Colorado, and I think every state has, to provide a free public education to all students. I mean, that involves students regardless of ethnic background, it’s with regard to students who have developmental challenges. We have to provide according to our constitution in the state or state constitution, this free education. And so then the question is, okay, so this school district has more money than that school district and this school district has nicer rooms and this school district pays teachers better. And, you know, on and on and on. And the real problems, you know, we can talk about all that stuff for a long time and it warrants a lot of conversation. But the primary indicator of whether students will be successful, whether students will have positive economic outcomes, whether students will be incarcerated as adults, whether they’ll be incarcerated as juveniles, And on down the line, whether they’ll receive, you know, how far they’ll go in their education is whether there is a father in the home, a biological father in the home. So really the breakdown, you know, if you want to get to brass tacks, is in the family, not in the schools. And another breakdown, another area of breakdown is in the church. I happen to be an evangelical Christian and the Bible says that the people ought to take care of the people. It doesn’t say that the government should take care of the people. And so often there’s this trumpeting of biblical, you know, directives about sharing things to try and impose a governmental system that will require people to give things. And that was never the idea of the Bible for that matter. And really if the, if the, Culture is to improve. The church has to improve. The marriages have to improve. The families have to improve. All the rest will take care of itself. You don’t have to be a Christian to have a good marriage. It helps. But you don’t have to be a Christian to have a good family, to have a good education, to make money, to be successful in the world. But the biblical values that Christians tend to subscribe to would serve us well.
SPEAKER 03 :
very well said brad and i’m looking at the time and we actually need to land our plane we could talk a whole lot more about some of these legal cases but i totally appreciate your time and to my listeners thanks for tuning in and catch me next time and remember educating the mind without the heart is no education so seek wisdom cultivate virtue and speak truth
SPEAKER 01 :
Thanks for tuning in to Restoring Education in America with Priscilla Ron. Visit PriscillaRon.com to connect or learn how you can sponsor future episodes to keep this message of faith, freedom, and education on the air.
