You know, people of all political and religious persuasions hold dumb opinions and say dumb things. But if you come across something so egregiously moronic that it causes your jaw to slump into your lap at the fact that the person writing it manages to tie their shoes in the morning, there’s a good chance it was written by a Christian right winger. Exhibit A: Rev. Mark Creech and this mind-blowingly idiotic column about separation of church and state.
I have for many years regarded Gregg Frazer, a historian from The Master’s College, as one of the finest scholars on the subject of religion and the Founding Fathers (he is the one who coined the phrase “theistic rationalist” to describe the views of the key founders, which I use often). In World Magazine, he and Barton have an exchange over Barton’s many distortions about Thomas Jefferson.
I’m sure it will come as a tremendous shock to you all that the indispensable Chris Rodda has, yet again, caught David Barton flagrantly lying about American history. Barton claimed on the Glenn Beck show that gun accidents didn’t happen during the founding period of the country because kids were all taught how to use guns.
Chris Rodda catches David Barton using a story out of a Louis L’Amour novel in arguing that not only should teachers in schools be armed, but so should students. Because a character in a Louis L’Amour book tried to kill a teacher, but all the armed students in the old west stopped him with their six-shooters.
In the Texas Freedom Network’s new report on the appalling content of many of the Bible courses offered by public schools in that state after the passage of a state law encouraging them to do so, they note that many of those courses include a lot of the fake quotes that we see again and again in “Christian nation” discussions, most of which can be traced to David Barton.
Georgia state Sen. Barry Loudermilk went on TBN and repeated David Barton’s ridiculous lie that the founding fathers based the entire American government on the Bible. The three branches of government, he says, comes from Isiah 33:22, which says the exact opposite, “the Lord is our judge, the Lord is our ruler, the Lord is our king.” That’s not three branches of government, it’s one person holding all power, the opposite of what the constitution requires. Worse yet he claims:
As I’ve said many times, I am a supporter of the individual rights interpretation of the Second Amendment. I do think it confers an individual right to bear arms. But that doesn’t mean there can’t be any limitations on that right, just as we have libel, perjury and fraud exceptions to free speech. And it certainly doesn’t mean what David Barton claims it means, which is that an individual can own any weapons that the government has:
Bradlee Dean’s latest bundle of stupid is entitled “Enemy of God = Enemy of America” and it’s all the usual lies and distortions, this time about Thomas Jefferson. Dean repeats many of David Barton’s false and long-discredited lies about Jefferson. Let’s take them one at a time.
You probably know by now that Damon Vix and his group Atheists United managed to get a nativity scene out of a public park in Santa Monica by forcing the city first to open up the park as a public forum and then, by putting up lots of non-religious displays, prompt them to shut down the whole thing and not allow any unattended displays of any kind. And I laud him and them for that. But I wish they cared more about accuracy, which ought to matter to atheists and skeptics more than to our opponents.
Republicans in control of the Michigan legislature rammed through a right-to-work law during their last-minute lame-duck session, as I’m sure you’ve heard by now. Turns out God was behind the whole thing, according to the state senator who pushed the bill through. Here he is talking to none other than David Barton:
Dispatches From the Culture Wars
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