Warren Throckmorton has long been trying to figure out how David Barton claims to speak to more than 400 groups a year (sometimes more than 600). Seems logistically impossible. I’m sure you’ll be shocked to hear that he does this by being dishonest. He found a document from one of Barton’s lawsuits that spelled out all his “appearances” before “groups.”
The Worldnetdaily recently started featuring a column by Bill Federer, another fake historian in the David Barton mold. Like Barton, he has no training in history. And like Barton, he likes to lie a lot. His latest column, claiming that Thomas Jefferson was a Christian, is a perfect example. The dishonesty is done mostly through out of context quotes.
For the fourth time, the Worldnetdaily has mentioned me in an article (not counting once when Joseph Farah quoted me but didn’t use my name). It’s the least they could do for all the attention I bring them. This time it’s an article about David Barton winning a $1 million settlement in a defamation suit. And he sounds like he wants to sue me and several others as well.
Gregg Frazer is a Christian historian that I have a lot of respect for. Unlike so many, he is intellectually honest in his work on the Founding Fathers and religion. And while I have my disagreements with him on the scope and nature of the religion clauses of the First Amendment, I agree with him in his assessment of the utter dishonesty of David Barton. Warren Throckmorton has, with Frazer’s permission, published a long review of Barton’s America’s Deadly Heritage.
Yeah, I know, David Barton being caught lying is very much a “water is wet” story, but it’s still worth documenting just how brazenly he lies and how secure he feels in doing so because he knows that his ignorant and deluded followers will neither catch him at or care if they did. Here’s the latest lie from a talk he gave at a church:
Rafeal Cruz, father of Sen. Ted Cruz, gives a lot of speeches that are little more than recitations of right wing myths and he borrows from David Barton a lot. But while speaking at John Hagee’s church, he repeated one of Barton’s most ridiculous lies, that the Supreme Court removed mandatory Bible reading from schools because it could cause “brain damage.”
I’m pretty sure this is at least the one millionth example of David Barton flat out lying about the Constitution in the process of making an astonishingly stupid argument about it. He says that the founders included an oath in the Constitution to tie it directly to religion:
I know this will be a terrible shock to my readers, but David Barton is lying again. A lot. After a caller to his radio show told what is almost certainly a false story about a TV show that supposedly said that Thomas Jefferson “hated Christianity and considered it a dangerous religion” and that it caused the inquisition, Barton claimed that the Christianity that caused the inquisition was totally different. But first, let’s see what Jefferson actually said on the subject:
David Barton, a man who would cross the street to tell a lie rather than stand still and tell the truth, is once again lying about the Pentagon forcing chaplains to perform same-sex marriages. They have done nothing of the sort, of course, but reality has never been a problem for Barton.
Bob Barr (yes, that Bob Barr) recently criticized his opponent in a House race in Georgia for being endorsed by fraud David Barton and Glenn Beck has leapt to the defense of his buddy Barton, assuring his listeners that Barton is just a wonderful, delightful man. And totally not bigoted.
David Barton is a liar. That’s been well-established. I don’t mean he sometimes gets things wrong, I mean he lies — constantly, flagrantly and repeatedly. His latest lie, which he’s told before, is that “the Obama administration has refused to prosecute any child pornography.”
Dispatches From the Culture Wars
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