Of all the dumb things religious righters have said about Obama’s decision not to defend DOMA in a single judicial district, this one by Jay Sekulow may take the cake:

I guess Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice didn’t get David Barton’s memo because he showed up on “The 700 Club” today to talk to Pat Robertson about the Obama administration’s DOMA decision, saying that everyone should “be very concerned that we’re now living in a monarchy”.

Funny, I don’t recall a peep from Sekulow when Bush was suspending habeas corpus, indefinitely detaining American citizens in solitary confinement, tapping our phones without warrants and ordering torture.

Though she still maintains that she’s waiting to hear from God directly, Rep. Michele Bachmann is clearly working toward running for president in 2012. And she gave what may have been her first real stump speech of the campaign in South Carolina the other day. My colleague Andy Birkey reports on some of the whoppers in that speech.

“If Obama is allowed to continue what I call his ‘reign of error’ for another second term, we will be at $21 trillion in debt,” she said. “We are talking Greece territory in the greatest country in the world. We are talking Greece.”

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Glenn Beck’s decision to start pushing Mormon history on his show has some of his usual supporters seeing red. Brannon Howse of the ultra-wingnut Worldview Matters didn’t like that at all:

On his radio show last week, Brannon Howse of Worldview Matters accused Glenn Beck of “bait and switch” tactics to bring Christians together into a coalition on shared goals and then draw them into Mormonism by using manipulative double language. “He’s setting up a conspiracy theory of hidden truths showing this to be a Mormon Christian country.”

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My friend Chris Rodda has been having some fun with Glenn Beck, who has begun devoting his Friday shows to spreading misinformation about the founding fathers — with the help of David Barton, of course. She’s begun putting out a series of videos called “No, Mr. Beck” where she debunks the false claims made on those shows.

The first installment corrects the claim that Congress purchased Bibles with tax money for use in schools. Here’s the video she put together on that claim:
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The Texas Freedom Network notes on its blog that David Barton, the Christian Nation apologist and chief distorter of American history, will be promoting on his internet radio show this week the work of Brad Dacus, president of the virulently anti-gay and Orwellianly misnamed Pacific Justice Institute.

So what’s wrong with Dacus? This is a lunatic who actually argued that stopping same sex marriage in California was just like stopping Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Video and a transcript below the fold.
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From an article about the upcoming Texas battle over social studies education:

“I’m an evangelical Christian, and I think David Barton and Peter Marshall are completely out to lunch,” said John Fea, a history professor at Messiah College in Pennsylvania, a Christian institution. “They are not experts on social studies and history. Neither of them are trained in history. They are preachers who use the past and history as a means of promoting a political agenda in the present.”

No kidding.

I’ve written for years about the Texas State Board of Education and the damage they do to education not just in that state but all over the country by virtue of the fact that they are such a huge customer for publishers that when they demand nonsense in their textbooks, it finds its way into everyone’s textbooks. Mariah Blake at the Washington Monthly shows why this has never been more true than right now:

As a result, the Lone Star State has outsized influence over the reading material used in classrooms nationwide, since publishers craft their standard textbooks based on the specs of the biggest buyers. As one senior industry executive told me, “Publishers will do whatever it takes to get on the Texas list.”

Until recently, Texas’s influence was balanced to some degree by the more-liberal pull of California, the nation’s largest textbook market. But its economy is in such shambles that California has put off buying new books until at least 2014. This means that McLeroy and his ultraconservative crew have unparalleled power to shape the textbooks that children around the country read for years to come.

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From David Barton, in a radio interview:

“Out of 182 nations at the UN this year, America is the only nation in the world that does not average a revolution every 30 to 40 years. We’re the only nation where we never have to think about having a new government in our lifetime, a revolution.”

You really have to wonder what color the sky is in his world.

It looks like the wingnuts on the Texas Board of Education got exactly what they wanted when they named Peter Marshall and David Barton to the group of “experts” to advise them on the social studies curriculum:

“The foremost problem that I see is that there is not nearly enough emphasis or credit given to the biblical motivations of America’s settlers and founders,” Evangelical minister Peter Marshall, the president of the Massachusetts-based Peter Marshall Ministries and one of the experts on the panel, told ABCNews.com.

And that’s what it was all about from the start. They wanted someone who would push Christian Nation nonsense into the textbooks. Since they couldn’t find any actual historians to do so, they found fake historians like Marshall and Barton.

That board of social science “experts” that includes religious right apologists with no expertise at all in the subject has hit the ground running, trying to rewrite history to cut out those evil liberals.

“To have César Chávez listed next to Ben Franklin” – as in the current standards – “is ludicrous,” wrote evangelical minister Peter Marshall, one of six experts advising the state as it develops new curriculum standards for social studies classes and textbooks. David Barton, president of Aledo-based WallBuilders, said in his review that Chávez, a Hispanic labor leader, “lacks the stature, impact and overall contributions of so many others.”

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To no one’s surprise, Texas Gov. Rick Perry has named a wingnut to head the State Board of Education — it just wasn’t the wingnut we expected. Instead of Cynthia Dunbar, he named Gail Lowe as chairman. How much of a wingnut is Lowe? She was the one who appointed David Barton to the advisory committee on the social studies curriculum. That fact alone makes her unqualified to drive past a school, much less control the curriculum taught inside of it.

She’s a young earth creationist, of course. And an advocate of abstinence-only sex education in a state with one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the country despite 96% of the school districts in the state teaching abstinence-only. So much for that theory. Lowe gets to serve as chairman for the next two years until the Texas legislature meets again.

This is actually about a year old but I missed it when it was posted. SBH, a frequent commenter here, managed to track down that famous fake quote from Patrick Henry and show where it came from. Here’s the quote as usually offered by the Christian Nation apologists:

It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ!

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