One of the ways you can tell that someone is an extremist is when virtually no one else is every pure enough for them. Ken Cuccinelli is one of the most anti-choice politicians imaginable, supporting mandatory invasive ultrasounds for women seeking abortions and advocating for the complete outlawing of abortion. But for David Barton, if he’d just been more anti-choice, he would have been elected governor of Virginia. What was left, killing abortion doctors and bombing clinics?
As Right Wing Watch points out, Rafael Cruz is now just repeating David Barton’s bullshit about the founding fathers, Christianity and the Constitution. He says that the Declaration of Independence is little more than a collection of sermons (what?) and that over half of the signers of the Declaration were “seminary graduates” and “theologians.” That is a ridiculous lie. They graduated from universities that were founded as seminaries, but that does not make them “seminary graduates,” much less “theologians.” In fact, as Chris Rodda pointed out, only four of them went to college for seminary studies and only two of them finished it.
You may remember that a few years ago the site Conservapedia made themselves virtually immune to parody by launching the Conservative Bible Project, which sought to re-translate the Bible to be more right-wing than it already is. Because King James, as we all know, was a raving Marxist. Richard Schiffman at Alternet checks in on how it’s going.
David Barton and Louis Gohmert may have passed on mounting a primary challenge to Sen. John Cornyn in Texas, but wingnut B-teamer Rep. Steve Stockman is in the race and going on the attack. In a letter to supporters, Stockman calls Cornyn a liberal 20 times.
Deranged wingnut Frank Gaffney seems to be competing with David Barton to see who can be the most audacious liar. He doesn’t care what the truth is as long as he can use it to make Obama look bad. Here’s what he had to say about John Kerry canceling a trip to the Ukraine after they pulled out of an agreement to join the European Union:
David Barton offers his usual revisionist history, claiming that everything good in American history came from the Bible. In fact, “it’s from this book that we get civil rights.” He must be reading a different Bible than I am. In fact, he says it was the Bible that was responsible for ending slavery, which is a staggeringly ridiculous statement.
A couple weeks ago, pseudo-historian fraud David Barton joined televangelist fraud Kenneth Copeland to tell veterans that they can’t have real PTSD because the Bible says they are heroes and ministers of God. After taking a lot of heat, Barton has released a statement defending himself. It’s typical Barton, where he just pretends that the criticism is coming from evil liberals and therefore is invalid. Oh, and he loves the troops, so they’re totally taking things out of context.
In completely unsurprising news, the owner and CEO of Hobby Lobby, who is fighting so hard to avoid having to provide for women’s health needs in his company’s group insurance policy, is also spending his fortune developing a Bible curriculum for use in public schools. The first target for its adoption is Mustang, Oklahoma.
With all the attention paid to Ken Ham’s creation museum over the last few years, it’s easy to forget about the Institute for Creation Research’s museum in Southern California. And the local museum council apparently wants to forget about them, since they denied them membership in their organization:
Many years ago, when I first started my blog, I had many exchanges with Joe Carter. He then had the blog Evangelical Realism and now works for the Southern Baptist Convention and blogs at The Gospel Coalition. He’s also a former Marine. And he’s really pissed off at David Barton and Kenneth Copeland for claiming that PTSD can be eliminated by one out-of-context Bible verse.
Dispatches From the Culture Wars
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