In the thread on Rep. Sam Johnson’s post about his bill to force military officers to swear on oath to God, I encountered the same kind of historical distortions I criticize so strongly when David Barton does it. But they came from an atheist claiming that some of the founders were atheists. His comment:
Right Wing Watch has caught David Barton in a lie — an exaggeration by the most charitable possible interpretation — that is entirely pointless. He tells audiences simultaneously that he speaks to nearly two groups a day and that he works so hard on his ranch all day long that he doesn’t have time for other things.
Warren Throckmorton is blogging at Patheos now, which is pretty cool for them. He notes that an effort is now being undertaken to draft David Barton to run for the Senate against Sen. John Cornyn in Texas. There’s a Facebook group with hundreds of members trying to get Barton to run. Remember, John Cornyn was rated as the 2nd most conservative member of the Senate in 2012. And even he isn’t far right enough for these people.
The Family Leader, a wingnut group in Iowa, is going to “celebrate the family” — that is, they’re going to attack families that include gay people or consider them human beings — by bringing in lying fraud David Barton for a dinner in November. And you’re gonna love how they present him:
One of the ways that Christian fundamentalists inoculate their followers and make them immune to facts is by telling them not to listen to anyone who disagrees with them or says they might be wrong. Those are bad people, on the side of the devil instead of God. Here’s David Barton’s version to his followers:
Uh oh. David Barton better have his head on a swivel because someone is looking to take over his territory — and it’s Rush Limbaugh. Rush has a new book coming out called — seriously, get this — Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims. And it’s a children’s book. And he got the idea when his wife apparently tried to burn their house down. Explaining why he’s refused to write a new book until now, he said:
I wrote recently about David Barton’s latest lie (well, probably not his latest; he seems to lie every time he opens his mouth), about an expert witness in Abington Township v Schempp. Hemant contacted Ellery Schempp, the plaintiff in that case, to get a reaction. And boy, what a reaction it was. Knowing what a nice guy Ellery is, he was clearly peeved about this:
David Barton continues to make the monumentally dishonest argument that many provisions of the Constitution were “direct quotations right out of Bible verses.” And he adds a couple of new Bible verses that not only aren’t directly quoted in the Constitution, they aren’t even distantly related to anything found in it.
You have to respect the efforts of the folks at Right Wing Watch to narrow the incredibly stupid things said by David Barton down to a list of ten. The man is like a human volcano, spewing lies and bullshit into the air at a staggering pace. Here’s their list:
David Barton is responding to some of the critics of his new and aptly-named book The Jefferson Lies and, true to form, his response is little more than a laundry list of logical fallacies with almost no substantive argument whatsoever. His most common form of argument is what I often call the argumentum ad labelum, or argument by label.
If there’s a chutzpah hall of fame, David Barton must be a first ballot inductee. You might want to turn off your irony meters before I tell you that he’s now complaining about people using quotes from the Founding Fathers that aren’t accurate.
Add this one to the long list of crazy from David Barton:
I will tell you that the science will always catch up with the Bible, it may not appear to be right it will always catch up, it always has, always will. We now have a study out in the last few months called “ex-gays,” and it is significant, it has changed the entire psychological, psychiatric world, because it documents authoritatively people who were homosexuals who no longer were. Now on the secular side they’ve been saying ‘oh there’s nothing you can do about it, you were born that way, that’s you’re nature,’ well if that’s true you can’t have ex-gays. That’s like being an ex-black or an ex-white or an ex-whatever.
So what it has done, science has now figured out, ‘you know God was right.’ So when you said that about you know God didn’t create you to be a homosexual, they’ll say, ‘well wait a minute science says,’ well science doesn’t say that anymore. Science just got changed this year to match what the Bible’s been telling us all along, and that’s why you always stick with the Bible, science will catch up with the Bible.
I don’t care who you are, that’s stupid right there.
Dispatches From the Culture Wars
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