CNN’s Sciutto: ‘You Can Imagine’ Schools Pulling Books Now that Parents Can Opt Out

On Friday’s broadcast of CNN’s “Inside Politics,” host Jim Sciutto stated that “you can imagine” schools “taking books off the shelves of their libraries” in the wake of the Supreme Court allowing parents to opt their children out of certain books.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said that “if you have a religious free exercise right to opt out of a compulsory exercise, for example, what the Supreme Court said in West Virginia v. Barnette, it applies not just to an exercise of religious conscience, but of conscience generally. If there are Jehovah’s Witness kids who don’t want to participate in the compulsory flag salute, it also applies to kids who are internationalists or pacifists or what have you. And it’s the same thing here, if you can opt out of mandatory classroom readings because it offends your religious objections, you can do it because it offends your philosophical beliefs, your political beliefs, your moral beliefs, or what have you. And the court basically says, well, we’ll deal with all of that down the road. There are going to be a lot more cases where people are saying, our family doesn’t believe in evolution, so we don’t want our kid to be in class when evolution is taught, it offends our religion. Or our family doesn’t believe in war, so we don’t want to be — we don’t want our kids in class when World War II is being taught about. And so the courts are going to have to figure that out. And so, again, they’re trying to flatter a particular political group, a MAGA group here, and I think it’s going to cause chaos going forward in terms of trying to figure out what it means to have a public education system.”

Sciutto then said, “Well, you can imagine just the remarkable possibility of books just — schools, rather, just taking books off the shelves of their libraries.”

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