The Texas Freedom Network has a new document on their website, a review of a history textbook written by David Barton and actually intended for use in public and private schools. It’s written by Prof. Steven Green of Willamette University, who teaches law and has a PhD in constitutional history and a master’s in American religious history. He writes in this report:
Chris Rodda has an exclusive from W.S. Smith, one of the three people David Barton is suing for defamation. Smith responds to the allegations in the complaint — and he is definitely not backing down. These are going to be fun cases to watch — if they ever actually make it to trial.
I’m reading Christopher Hitchens’ new essay collection on my Kindle and the first essay is about religion and the founding fathers. He says of Ben Franklin:
Of Franklin, it seems almost certainly right to say that he was an atheist (Jerry Weinberger’s recent study Benjamin Franklin Unmasked being the best reference here), but the master tacticians of church-state separation, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, were somewhat more opaque about their beliefs.
David Barton says criticism of his terrible scholarship is akin to the persecution of Jesus:
Dallas: Well when the secular press tries to pigeonhole you as a historical revisionist, how does that make you feel? How do you combat that? How do we combat that? Because we use a lot of your materials, David, what do you say to that?
Barton: One of the things that I’ve found is that they like to go after me but they won’t go after the content because it’s documented so well, in our case we have 100,000 documents from before 1812. I have four law schools out there, secular law schools, who have entire websites smashing me, trashing me, but they’ve never been able to go after the content, they just don’t like what’s there. So what they’ll do is, and I don’t want to compare myself in anyway, but it’s the same tactic they used with Jesus. When Jesus had content that would change people’s lives they’d say ‘oh he’s a wine-drinker, he’s a glutton,’ and they would make things up about him and that’s designed to sever people from listening to him, ‘who wants to listen to a drunkard, who wants to listen to a glutton?’ So what you have to do is, you get by there, Jesus ignored those comment, you keep putting out the information so you don’t worry about when they attack you, you don’t worry about what they say, you get a whole bunch of people who will listen and you just overwhelm them with numbers.
To give you an idea of just how crazed David Barton is, look at what he said on a recent radio show. He says Congress should impeach any judge who issues a ruling they don’t like. And he starts with this illogical argument:
Barton: Well, the first part is they’re not appointed for life. That’s one of the things that people think today and this is one of the great judicial myths that’s out there that’s absolutely not accurate. If you go back and look at the Constitution, Article III deals with the judiciary; there’s nothing in there about judges being appointed for life. They’re not appointed for life.
What they did, and what they also did in the federal Constitution, when you read it it says federal judges are allowed to hold their appointments for the quote ‘duration of good behavior.’ That’s not a lifetime appointment – that’s as long as you act right you can stay there as a federal judge. But if you don’t act right, we’re going to take you out.
Focus on the Family continues to shrink, laying off people and seeing its budget go down significantly.
Focus on the Family on Friday announced the layoff of 49 more employees due to decreased donations, bringing down the number of employees to less than half it had in 2002.
This new 7 percent staff reduction in the Colorado Springs, Colo.-based pro-family group brought the employee number to 650, down from a 2002 peak of 1,400 people, according to The Denver Post…
Focus on the Family’s budget for fiscal year 2008-2009 was $160 million, which came down to $138 million in 2009-2010. For the fiscal year 2010-2011 ending Sept. 30, it further shrunk to $105 million, and now officials project it will receive donations of only $90 million to $95 million.
David Barton gave a talk at Liberty University recently and Warren Throckmorton caught him making several false claims in just the first five minutes of his talk. Barton said:
We have the same thing when you look at Quakers. You see Quakers were founded by William Penn in Pennsylvania. I’ll lay you odds there’s no chance that William Penn would be a Quaker today, even in the denomination he founded, he would not be a part of. We look at it the way it is today and say it must have been the way they were back then.
It’s pretty well established at this point that it’s very likely Thomas Jefferson fathered children with one of his slaves, Sally Hemmings. For David Barton, it’s all a liberal lie designed to protect Bill Clinton. Here’s video of him expounding on this bizarre conjecture at Liberty University:
Woohoo, it’s more wingnut-on-wingnut crime! A Christian radio station in Texas has dropped David Barton’s daily radio show from its lineup because Barton has been defending Glenn Beck, who is Mormon, as a Christian.
An affiliate radio station of the Moody Network in East Texas, KBJS-FM canceled David Barton’s Wallbuilders Live radio program during the show yesterday while Barton was discussing Glenn Beck’s religious beliefs. Randy Featherstone, KBJS manager, said the show was dropped due to Barton’s failure to distinguish between Mormon theology and Christianity.
“When David Barton said it doesn’t matter whether you are a Mormon or a Baptist or a Methodist, we felt we had to do something,” Featherstone explained.
Wingnut David Barton has filed lawsuits against three people — two former candidates for the Texas Board of Education and one atheist blogger I’ve never heard of.
The suit alleges Judy Jennings and Rebecca Bell-Metereau, both former Democratic candidates for Texas State Board of Education positions during the 2010 election, published an ad falsely identifying Barton as being sympathetic to white supremacists.
The YouTube ad, a nearly five minute video with fewer than 9,500 views painting some former board of education members as extremists attempting to take truth from public school textbooks, characterizes Barton as “known for speaking at white supremacist rallies.”
Dispatches From the Culture Wars
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