David Barton
Showing the world he knows his faith is a lie.
Showing the world he knows his faith is a lie.
No-one epitomises the axiom that when you show the world you know you need to lie for your faith, you show the world that you know your faith is a lie that needs fools to believe falsehoods, than pseudo-historian and right-wing Christian Talibangelical, David Barton.
David Barton relies on the guaranteed fact that his right-wing audience will be mostly ignorant of both the Bible and American history and will never fact check any of his claims. So long as he tells them what they want to hear, they will continue to give him money and support his efforts to turn the USA into a fundamentalist Christian theocracy.
Here he is, for example, fooling his audience into believing that the American Constitution was ratified by Christian churches and that preachers were "highly, highly involved" in the ratification process.
The truth, as we've come to expect with David Barton's claims, is very different.
The proposed Constitution was sent to the then just thirteen states of the Union for ratification, with each state required to nominate delegates to meet and approve the proposal. Most of these meetings took place in the states' legislative chambers but a few met in churches, not for religious reasons but for the simple convenience of enough space for the delegates and the audience, such as newspaper reporters and others, who wished to witness the historic proceedings, to meet. The new Constitution needed to be ratified by 9 of the 13 states, to pass into federal law. In fact, it was ratified by all of them.
As the historian, Pauline Maier, explained in her book, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution:
The ratifying convention did all it could to make its deliberations available to the people. It agreed, for example, to provide reporters from the Massachusetts Centinel and the Independent Chronicle with seats within the convention hall so they could take notes on the debates. Other newspapers in Massachusetts and a stunning fifty-one in other states reprinted accounts of the debates, sometimes almost in their entirety, for readers who understood that the Constitution's future might well be decided in Massachusetts. No other state convention received equivalent coverage. The convention also made its official journal available to any printer who requested it. But what about the people who insisted on witnessing the event with their own eyes and ears?As for the "highly, highly involved" preachers, just 44 of the delegates, of the 1,750 chosen by the 13 states (i.e., 2.5%), were preachers. There is no suggestion that they played any greater part in the proceedings than the other 97.5% of delegates.
The convention quickly accepted an invitation from the fashionable Brattle Street Church and moved there on its second day. That church was large, with galleries (or balconies) for spectators and, unlike any other church in Boston, stoves for heat. But its acoustics turned out to be terrible for a large meeting; many delegates complained that they could not hear the speakers. As a result, on Saturday, January 12, delegates and listeners crowded back into the State House, where the air was "exceedingly Noxious & disagreeable" because of the "immense Number of People" in the galleries. Some spectators scrambled into empty seats on the floor of the house to hear better. That caused confusion, so the convention voted to "exclude from the floor of the House all persons not belonging to the Convention, except such as are admitted by special order." Finally, it found a more suitable meeting place at the Congregational church on Long Lane, where the Reverend Jeremy Belknap, another Boston delegate to the convention and an avid historian, was pastor. Some "Gentlemen Of the Town" volunteered to add a stove and a temporary stairvvay from an exterior porch to the galleries, which kept spectators from going onto the main floor; the galleries could hold as many as six to eight hundred persons. The convention moved there on the afternoon of January 17 and stayed until its deliberations had ended.
It's also axiomatic of Christian fundamentalism that having an argument refuted is not considered a good enough reason not to try to get away with it on a different audience, and David Barton is certainly not one to allow the refutation of his claims to prevent him repeating them. One of his favourite lies, which he still repeats regularly, is that claim that Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer wrote an opinion in which he stated that “we all know that all the provisions in the Bill of Rights, the due process clauses, came out of the Bible.” The Bill of Rights is the first 10 amendments to the US Constitution, and not a single phrase in it is to be found anywhere in the Bible. What Justice Breyer actually wrote, in his concurrence with the ruling in Lilly v. Virginia (1999), concerning the right to confront ones accusers in a court of law, is:
The Court’s effort to tie the Clause so directly to the hearsay rule is of fairly recent vintage, compare Roberts, supra, with California v. Green, 399 U.S. 149, 155—156 (1970), while the Confrontation Clause itself has ancient origins that predate the hearsay rule, see Salinger v. United States, 272 U.S. 542, 548 (1926) (“The right of confrontation did not originate with the provision in the Sixth Amendment, but was a common-law right having recognized exceptions”). The right of an accused to meet his accusers face-to-face is mentioned in, among other things, the Bible, Shakespeare, and 16th and 17th century British statutes, cases, and treatises. See The Bible, Acts 25:16; W. Shakespeare, Richard II, act i, sc. 1; W. Shakespeare, Henry VIII, act ii, sc. 1; 30 C. Wright & K. Graham, Federal Practice and Procedure §6342, p. 227 (1997) (quoting statutes enacted under King Edward VI in 1552 and Queen Elizabeth I in 1558); cf. Case of Thomas Tong, Kelyng J. 17, 18, 84 Eng. Rep. 1061, 1062 (1662) (out-of-court confession may be used against the confessor, but not against his co-conspirators); M. Hale, History of the Common Law of England 163—164 (C. Gray ed. 1971); 3 W. Blackstone, Commentaries *373. As traditionally understood, the right was designed to prevent, for example, the kind of abuse that permitted the Crown to convict Sir Walter Raleigh of treason on the basis of the out-of-court confession of Lord Cobham, a co-conspirator. See 30 Wright & Graham, supra, §6342, at 258—269. [My emphasis]Which is of course, a very far cry indeed from the Bill of Rights being lifted from the Bible. Given what Justice Breyer wrote, it would be just as valid, and just as ludicrous, to claim Breyer said the Bill of Rights was penned by Shakespeare or copied from 16th century English statutes. He was simply saying that the clause expresses an ancient and basic concept in English Common Law. In fact, that verse of the Bible bears a little reading, because, in context, it is clearly referring to an established Roman principle, rather than any Christian idea:
And after certain days king Agrippa and Bernice came unto Caesarea to salute Festus. And when they had been there many days, Festus declared Paul's cause unto the king, saying, There is a certain man left in bonds by Felix: About whom, when I was at Jerusalem, the chief priests and the elders of the Jews informed me, desiring to have judgment against him.But then David Barton can depend on his audience who want to be given excuses for imposing their bigotry on others, being largely ignorant of the Bible and what they actually want imposed on others. Their fundamentalism is simply the excuse they need for imposing their bigotry on others; it's not for any high-minded principle or notion of superior morals. Barton knows that come the day of a theocratic government being installed, those who have supported it will be content to sit back and let the self-appointed theocrats tell them what to think, secure in their own smug self-righteousness that they are booking a place in Heaven, and prominent amongst them will be, of course, David Barton.
To whom I answered, It is not the manner of the Romans to deliver any man to die, before that he which is accused have the accusers face to face, and have licence to answer for himself concerning the crime laid against him.
Acts 25:13-16
When you show the world you know you need to lie for your faith, you show the world you know your faith is a lie that requires fools to believe falsehoods!
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