[Pastor Paul Blair of Fairview Baptist Church in Edmond, Okla.] is founder of a group called Reclaiming Oklahoma for Christ, an outreach to pastors that encourages church leaders to take a stand against the spread of immorality in American culture. He is urging pastors across the nation to stop being silent and muster the courage to speak out against efforts to criminalize Christianity. He said church leaders have abandoned the prophetic call and have chosen instead to be CEOs of competitive church businesses rather than proclaiming "faith in Christ alone and repentance from sin."
"Pastors used to speak strongly about issues – like when Billy Sunday led a crusade, and the next thing you know, liquor was outlawed. So they made a difference," he said. "The year 1954 is when pastors began to grow timid because, all of the sudden, they had this misguided notion that they might lose their tax exemption if they made too much noise."
Shortly after ministers grew silent, prayer and Bible reading were taken out of schools. The sexual revolution immediately followed, along with Roe v. Wade. Now, he said, attacks on Christian liberty and morality have become more brazen and coordinated than ever – with widespread movements to legalize homosexual marriage, the Department of Homeland Security's efforts to profile Christians as "potential terrorists" and strategies to silence pastors through hate crimes legislation.
...
Blair is stepping up the effort by calling on "patriot pastors" to lead their congregations in three areas: 1) evangelizing and leading people to Christ to change the culture 2) educating people about the truth of America's Christian heritage and real threats like the Hate Crimes Prevention Act and 3) contacting elected representatives by writing letters and participating in petition drives.
His church is planning a special Memorial Day weekend sermon where he will bring in a 150-foot crane to fly the American flag as he warns his congregation of attacks on freedom.
"We absolutely will be addressing the fact that freedom isn't free," he said. "We'll talk about the great sacrifice that was paid for the liberty we enjoy and how there are attacks on that liberty not just abroad, but here at home."
Accompanying this article was this ten minute video in which Blair runs through the litany of right-wing lies about hate crimes legislation:
While watching it, my first thought was “this sounds an awful lot like the nonsense Janet Porter has been peddling” which, as it turns out, makes sense because Blair’s organization has ties to Porter, having signed on to her recent effort to pressure Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to resign.
It made even more sense when I saw that she was going to be a featured speaker at the upcoming Reclaiming Oklahoma for Christ Conference:
The 2009 conference will be held on July 24 and 25 at Oklahoma Christian University in Edmond.
Scheduled speakers include Peter LaBarbera from Americans for Truth, Dr. John Morris from the Institute for Creation Research (ICR), LTG (Ret.) Jerry Boykin, one of the original members of the U.S. Army's Delta Force, and Faith2Action President Janet (Folger) Porter.
Boykin, you may recall, made news a few years back when he declared that we were at war with Islam and that our “spiritual enemy ... will only be defeated if we come against them in the name of Jesus” but that we would eventually win because our God is real while they worshiped an idol. Since leaving the military, he’s hooked-up with fringe Religious Right figures like Rick Scarborough and now, apparently, Reclaiming Oklahoma for Christ.
In fact, ROC seems to have some pretty significant ties to a variety of second and third-tier right-wing leaders. According to its website, its 2008 conference featured the likes of David Barton, Bill Federer, and Mat Staver. The organization also participated in the “One Day Crusade” events put on by Scarborough and Gordon Klingenschmitt before the election last year and was deeply involved in rallying support for Oklahoma legislator Sally Kern, the self-proclaimed “warrior for Judeo-Christian values” who declared that the “homosexual agenda” was “the biggest threat our nation has, even more so than terrorism or Islam.”
It seems that while we were busy not paying any attention this organization, they were busy building relationships with a variety of more high-profile right-wing leaders and organizations to whom we do pay attention. And since they seem to be treating ROC as a legitimate ally, I guess we’re going to have to start trying to pay a bit more attention to what they are up to.
A few weeks ago, we pointed to a Texas Freedom Network post reporting that the Texas State Board of Education was going to appoint David Barton to a social studies curriculum “expert” panel, which was absurd given Barton’s flagrant lack of expertise on anything other than misrepresenting history in order to further his own right-wing political agenda.
But perhaps nothing better sums up the absurdity of this move than this article from OneNewsNow, considering that just about every claim and statement it contains is laughable, starting with its title: “History scholar hopes to revamp Texas curriculum”:
WallBuilders is a Texas-based conservative organization "dedicated to presenting America's forgotten history and heroes." Organization president David Barton has once again been selected by the Texas State Board of Education to review proposed history curriculum and prepare a report as the board reviews new standards for history in The Lone Star State. He says the new curriculum currently proposed for the state is in shambles.
"For example, the panel managed to eliminate all references to free enterprise out of our history, social study, government textbooks, and that's the type of things we find. The religious bigotry that's there, preference for secular stuff, ignoring the religious foundations," he notes.
"There's a mis-description of the types and forms of government that we have. There's no mention of American exceptionalism -- the fact that we are the most successful nation in the history of the world with a government that bears fruit to that."
Barton expects outside groups to "holler and scream" about his recommendations to fix those errors due to the fact that he is a Christian and a conservative. But he adds that he and other members of the panel will give recommendations that are so historically accurate that board members will have a hard time refuting them.
Seriously, the assertion that Barton’s recommendations will be “so historically accurate that board members will have a hard time refuting them” made me laugh out loud considering that being accurate has never been a particular concern for Barton in the past.
The latest issue of Americans United's "Church and State" has a lengthy cover story by Rob Boston analyzing just who might step up to lead the Religious Right in the years to come, now that many of its well-known leaders have passed away and others are aging and scaling back their workloads.
Boston takes a look at a variety of potential candidates - including Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, Tony Perkins, Rick Warren, Rod Parsley, and Rick Scarborough - but he starts off his list with Newt Gingrich:
The idea of Newt Gingrich as the next leader of the Religious Right is not as odd as it sounds. During his tenure as speaker of the House of Representatives, Gingrich was known mainly for his promotion of small government, low taxes and libertarian ideas, but a lot has changed since 1999; in recent years Gingrich has increasingly been stressing Religious Right themes.
The new push began in 2006 when Gingrich published a book titled Rediscovering God in America: Reflections on the Role of Faith in Our Nation’s History, a tome that promotes a “Christian nation” history that’s always popular with the Religious Right.
In a recent interview with Dan Gilgoff of U.S. News & World Report, Gingrich talked about his desire to unite conservative evangelicals with traditionalist Roman Catholics in support of a broad conservative agenda.
Gingrich, Gilgoff reported, is traveling around the country speaking to clergy on behalf of David Barton, a Religious Right pseudo-historian who has written books promoting the theocratic “Christian nation” viewpoint.
“In the last few years I’ve decided that we’re in a crisis in which the secular state, if allowed, will fundamentally and radically change America against the wishes of most Americans,” Gingrich told Gilgoff. “You’ve had such rising hostility to religious belief that I wanted to reach broadly into the country and dramatically raise public awareness of threats to religious liberty.”
The ex-speaker added, “It’s time to challenge head-on secular domination in the West.”
Gingrich has formed a new organization, Renewing American Leadership, that partnered with the Rev. Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association to sponsor anti-tax rallies around the country on April 15. Although taxation is not traditionally a Religious Right issue, the push is a good example of Gingrich’s efforts to add to the “culture war” agenda and unite the various factions of the conservative movement.
I'd like to second Boston's assertion that Gingrich could very well become a leading figure within the Religious Right and I'll offer this recent email from the American Family Association up as evidence:
We fully expect someone like Huckabee to gladly associate himself with people such as Barton, Staver, Engle, and Falwell, becuase he has done sobefore and they were all big supporters of his presidential bid.
But, until recently at least, one person you would never see at a third-tier Religious Right event such as this was Gingrich. His partnering with the AFA and Barton and now his participation in events like this all suggest that Gingrich is making a serious play to establish himself as a respected and influential player within the Religious Right, perhaps as part of his effort to unify the conservative movement ahead of his own potential presidential run.
We don't pay that much attention to the ins-and-outs of goings-on regarding the Texas State Board of Education, but the Texas Freedom Network certainly does and they report this latest development:
The Texas State Board of Education is set to appoint a social studies curriculum “expert” panel that includes absurdly unqualified ideologues who are hostile to public education and argue that laws and public policies should be based on their narrow interpretations of the Bible.
TFN has obtained the names of “experts” appointed by far-right state board members. Those panelists will guide the revision of social studies curriculum standards for Texas public schools. They include David Barton of the fundamentalist, Texas-based group WallBuilders, whose degree is in religious education, not the social sciences, and the Rev. Peter Marshall of Peter Marshall Ministries in Massachusetts, who suggests that California wildfires and Hurricane Katrina were divine punishments for tolerance of homosexuality.
The two have argued that the Constitution doesn’t protect separation of church and state and hold a variety of other extreme views related to religion, education and government, TFN President Kathy Miller said.
...
Barton, former vice chairman of the Texas Republican Party, is a self-styled “historian” without any formal training in the field. He argues that separation of church and state is a “myth” and that the nation’s laws should be based on Scripture. He says, for example, that the Bible forbids taxes on income and capital gains. Yet even such groups as Texas Baptists Committed and the Baptist Joint Committee have sharply criticized Barton’s interpretations of the Constitution and history.
Barton also acknowledges having used in his publications and speeches nearly a dozen quotes he has attributed to the nation’s Founders even though he can’t identify any primary sources showing that they really said them.
Some state board members have criticized what they believe are efforts to overemphasize the contributions of minorities in the nation’s history. It is alarming, then, that in 1991 Barton spoke at events hosted by groups tied to white supremacists. He later said he hadn’t known the groups were “part of a Nazi movement.”
In addition, Barton’s WallBuilders Web site suggests as a “helpful” resource the National Association of Christian Educators/Citizens for Excellence in Education, an organization that calls public schools places of "social depravity" and "spiritual slaughter."
The Peter Marshall Ministries Web site includes Marshall’s commentaries sharply attacking Muslims, characterizing the Obama administration as “wicked,” and calling on Christian parents to reject public education for their children.
Marshall has also attacked Roman Catholic and mainline Protestant churches. In his call for a spiritual revival in America last year, he called traditional mainline Protestantism an “institutionally fossilized, Bible-rejecting shell of Christianity.”
TFN also provides informative links to these documents containing more info about both Barton and Marshall, and so I'll just add links to all of our posts on Barton as well as a link to our report on him, "Propaganda Masquerading as History," for good measure.
Earlier this year, I wrote a post noting that David Barton and Wallbuilders had released a computerized version of the God-filled dictionary that Noah Webster originally intended, claiming that this original version was necessary because the dictionary had "undergone extensive censorship to remove its Christian emphasis and examples."
So you just knew that Barton would jump at the chance to highlight the importance of his original dictionary and try and make some sales when it was revealed that Merriam Webster had expanded its definition of the word "marriage" to include "the state of being united to a person of the same sex in a relationship like that of a traditional marriage."
Even though the change was made way back in 2003, the Religious Right didn't freak out about it until recently, and Barton is seizing the opportunity to once again peddle his version:
One of the best ways to combat the new agenda is to renounce the new definition and continue to use the original. Or, as Proverbs 22:28 wisely instructs: "Do not move an ancient boundary stone set up by your forefathers." One means to help preserve the ancient "boundary stones" of Biblical meanings is to use Noah Webster's original 1828 dictionary rather than the new on-line dictionaries that are moving further and further away from Biblical meanings. We are offering the original Webster's Dictionary on CD ROM so that you can install it on your computer and instantly call up a conservative and Biblical meaning for words.
Is this really the best the Right can come up with? Renouncing new versions of the dictionary in favor of a ninety year-old version and it's biblical definitions?
Just for the record, in 1828, the United State had had a total of 6 Presidents and 24 state - a lot has happened in the world since then and lots of new words have come into use to identify and explain them.
You'd think that a reference book that doesn't even know of the existence of things like automobiles, telephones, or computers would be worthless ... but Barton apparently thinks it is worth $39.95.
Dan Gilgoff reports that Newt Gingrich is unveiling a new effort, called Renewing American Leadership, designed to bring together both the economic and social conservative wings of the Republican Party’s base under a common banner:
Gingrich will be working with David Barton, with whom he has struck up a strong relationship in recent years, as well as working to convince fiscal conservatives to start making nice with their socially conservative allies in order to take advantage of their shared ideology and values:
At a time when many religious conservatives say the Republican Party is ignoring their issues and taking their support for granted, former House speaker and GOP idea man Newt Gingrich is turning his attention to the concerns of conservative Christians like never before.
Gingrich has launched an organization devoted to bringing conservative evangelicals and Catholics into the political process and to strengthening the frayed alliance between economic and religious conservatives. Called Renewing American Leadership, the group is led by Gingrich's longtime communications director and includes some of the country's top conservative Christian activists on its board.
This spring, Gingrich will speak to a handful of large gatherings for politically conservative clergy that have been organized by David Barton, an influential evangelical activist who spearheaded the Republican National Committee's rigorous outreach to pastors in 2004.
…
Just this week, Gingrich's new group partnered with the American Family Association—the conservative evangelical organization headed by Don Wildmon—to encourage churches and religious groups to participate in no-more-taxes rallies across the country on April 15. Rick Tyler, who served as Gingrich's spokesman before becoming founding director of Renewing American Leadership, says that on the first day of the largely Web-based organizing effort, 5,000 people signed up to attend the rallies.
The antitax rallies illustrate the new group's quest to unite religious and fiscal conservatives, two flanks of the Republican base that have squabbled with one another since Election Day. "There's too much finger-pointing between economic conservatives who say we're losing ground because of social conservatives and social conservatives who say the opposite," says Barton, who sits on Renewing American Leadership's board. "Instead of having a circular firing squad, we need to start identifying real allies and the real opponents."
To accomplish the goal, Renewing American Leadership has prepared a PowerPoint presentation it plans to show conservative economic groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Americans for Tax Reform, laying out the case for taking religious conservatives more seriously. The PowerPoint slides list Republican senators and congressman with the highest ratings from the National Right to Life Committee and juxtapose them with ratings for the same elected officials from Americans for Tax Reform. The conclusion: politicians with the strongest socially conservative records also have the strongest antitax records.
"Secular conservatives often operate from a perspective that says, 'Why should I care about evangelical voters?' " says Tyler. "And I show them why: because when you turn out evangelical voters who support socially conservative candidates, you also get conservative economic policies."
As we pointed, these two groups share much of the same agenda but often have different priorities and it looks like Gingrich is trying to get them to come together for their mutual benefit.
Of course, the success of this effort depends largely on the GOP’s ability to field candidates who appeal to both groups. The problem with Rudy Giuliani, for instance, was that while fiscal conservatives might have been willing to consider supporting him, social conservatives most certainly were not. Conversely, while the social conservatives had much to admire about Mike Huckabee, the economic conservatives did not. In the end, the GOP ended up with John McCain, whom neither side particularly liked.
The key to success of this project is to get economic and social conservatives to work together to find candidates that both side can support. And that seems to be what Gingrich is focusing on by getting the fiscally conservative groups to realize that they have an ally in the Religious Right and that by finding candidates that appeal to them they not only guarantee the Right’s substantial political support, but will end with candidates that will push both the social and fiscal conservatives’ agendas.
This is a politically smart undertaking but it might take someone with more credibility than Gingrich to make it work, considering that just last year he was saying that the reason the GOP keeps losing elections is because it keep playing to its base and, in the process, "drives away the non-base." On top of that, many right-wing leaders voiced concerns about Gingrich's past when he was contemplating his own run. Gingrich has since confessed his failings to James Dobson and is currently mulling over the prospect of making a run for the White House in 2012, so perhaps this effort should be seen primarily as a means for Gingrich to rally both the economic and social conservatives behind his own potential campaign.
For the last few days, Pam has been covering the marriage amendment rally in North Carolina that was held yesterday where, as the News and Observer put it, a thousand people to showed up to demand that state legislators give them a chance to vote on a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.
In her post today, Pam also highlights this new argument for the need for such an amendment:
Two well-known conservative Christian commentators who spoke at the rally described a breakdown of society should gay couples be allowed to marry -- including a rise in single-parent households and in the number of dependents wanting Social Security and health insurance benefits.
David Gibbs III, a lawyer who in 2005 fought to keep brain-damaged Terri Schiavo on life support, told rally participants gay marriage would "open the door to unusual marriage in North Carolina.
"Why not polygamy, or three or four spouses?" Gibbs asked. "Maybe people will want to marry their pets or robots.”
It should be noted as well that pseudo-historian David Barton was also a featured speaker:
The rally was sponsored by Return America of Davidson County and by NC4Marriage, a new nonprofit group set up to fight for a constitutional amendment. Many participants were already wearing bumper stickers and buttons made for the campaign, reading, "Let the people vote," or "One Man, One Woman, That's Marriage."
At least a half-dozen state legislators attended the rally under sunny skies and 31-degree temperatures. Each speaker asked that people not leave before visiting with their legislators and asking them to support legislation allowing a referendum. And though many people eager to escape the cold jumped into church vans immediately after the hourlong rally, others flooded the legislative offices.
"Don't just call today, call them once a week," said David Barton, founder of WallBuilders, a ministry devoted to educating Americans about the nation's religious foundation. "Let them feel the heat until they see the light."
In yesterday's Right Wing Leftovers, I mentioned that both Phyllis Schlafly and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison are scheduled to speak at the Denton County [Texas] Republican Party's annual Lincoln-Reagan dinner in a week or so.
I thought that seemed odd because hard-line Religious Right leaders, like Rick Scarborough, are currently livid that Hutchison is planning on challenging current Republican Governor Rick Perry because they see her as insufficiently right-wing, primarily on reproductive choice issues. But I couldn't find anything from Schlafly or the Eagle Forum going after Hutchison on this, so I didn't mention it.
But now I see that Matt Lewis at Townhall is reporting that Texas Eagle Forum president Cathie Adams has teamed up with David Barton to undermine Hutchison's primary bid:
Pro-life Activists in Texas, including Texas Eagle Forum President and RNC Committeewoman Cathie Adams and WallBuilders Founder and President David Barton, are also weighing in on the issue by pointing the differences between Rick Perry and Kay Bailey Hutchinson.
An email recently distributed by the two says: “Senator Hutchinson served for many years as an Honorary Advisory Board Member of the WISH List, whose mission is to raise money to identify, train, and elect pro-abortion Republican women at all levels of Government.”
And an accompanying flier notes that, “Governor Perry has always been active in the pro-life movement," and that "Senator Hutchinson supports legal abortion until viability and has called for the removal or weakening of the pro-life plank of the Republican party.”
The biting part is that the flier compares and contrasts John Cornyn and Rick Perry's conservative records versus Kay Bailey Hutchinson -- who is closely compared to President Barack Obama.
That ought to make for some interesting conversation at the Lincoln-Reagan Dinner, since Schlafly just happens to be the national head of the Eagle Forum, who's state affiliate is now attacking Hutchison by comparing her to Barack Obama.
On a related note, Lewis also linked to this video Rick Scarborough released last month blasting Hutchison for daring to run for Governor and demanding that she return all the donations she received for her Senate campaign:
If you are anything like me, whenever you reach for your dictionary you think to yourself: "You know what this reference book needs? More Bible verses."
Fortunately, David Barton has taken time away from discovering America's forgotten ultra-religious history to create a computerized version of the God-filled dictionary that Noah Webster originally intended:
Today, Webster is primarily known for the massive dictionary that bears his name. He published a small dictionary in 1806, and in 1807 began work on his great dictionary ... Webster began that dictionary with a dedication to God, praying that it would be useful for "the moral and religious elevation of character and the glory of my country." For decades, it also contained Webster's personal testimony of his conversion to Christ. Additionally, after defining each word, he provided examples to clarify the meanings of the word, and a large percentage of his examples were Bible verses.
Since its original publication in 1828, Webster's dictionary has undergone extensive censorship to remove its Christian emphasis and examples. Although the most popular dictionary in America still bears his name, today it no longer reflects the spirit of the original. But now you can enjoy the Biblical worldview inculcated throughout his original dictionary, for we are now offering an electronic, searchable copy of Webster's dictionary on CD ROM.
You know, I never thought I'd see the day when the Right was complaining that our reference books were insufficiently inculcated with a Biblical worldview ... yet here we are. Lesson learned.
We've written about right-wing pseudo-historian David Barton on a number of occasions and followed his work closely for several years, so usually when he produces a new piece or shows up to speak at an event, we have a pretty good idea what he is up to.
But today I was talking a look at his Wallbuilders website and came across this newly released report entitled "Confronting Civil War Revisionism: Why the South Went To War" and was utterly confused. In it, Barton proclaims that there is an effort underway to to re-write history to convince contemporary Americans that the "Civil War was not a result of the slavery issue but rather of oppressive federal economic policies."
I had no idea that there was such an effort underway ... but I had even less of an idea why Barton would undertake his own effort to refute it in order to "disprove these claims and indisputably show that the South’s desire to preserve slavery was indisputably the driving reason for the formation of the Confederacy."
Yet that is exactly what he did, laying out a series of declarations of succession from southern states that cite the issue of slavery as a primary concern.
But still I couldn't figure out what Barton was so intent on reminding everyone that the reason for the Civil War wasn't "states' rights" or economic oppression or whatever - it was slavery. At least I couldn't figure it out until I came to this section discussing the election of 1860, at which point it all made sense:
Why was the Republican election victory a cause for secession? Because the Republican Party had been formed in May of 1854 on the almost singular issue of opposition to slavery (see WallBuilders’ work, American History in Black and White). Only six years later (in the election of 1860), voters gave Republicans control of the federal government, awarding them the presidency, the House, and the Senate.
The Republican agenda was clear, for every platform since its inception had boldly denounced slavery. In fact, when the U. S. Supreme Court delivered the 1857 Dred Scott ruling protecting slavery and declaring that Congress could not prohibit it even in federal territories, 10 the Republican platform strongly condemned that ruling and reaffirmed the right of Congress to ban slavery in the territories. 11 But setting forth an opposite view, the Democrat platform praised the Dred Scott ruling 12 and the continuation of slavery 13 and also loudly denounced all anti-slavery and abolition efforts. 14
The antagonistic position between the two parties over the slavery issue was clear; so when voters gave Republicans control of the federal government in 1860, southern slave-holding Democrat states saw the proverbial “handwriting on the wall” and promptly left the United States before Republicans could make good on their anti-slavery promises. It was for this reason that so many of the seceded states referenced the Republican victory in their secession documents.
It was not just southern Democrats who viewed the election of Lincoln and the Republicans as the death knell for slavery; many northern Democrats held the same view.
Suddenly it made sense that Barton would produce this sort of document laying out the central role that slavery played in the decision by Southern states to secede from the union because the South was dominated by the Democratic Party at that time. As such, the rest of the report consists of Barton citing Democratic elected officials from the time vociferously defending the institution of slavery while highlighting the Republicans Party's resolute refusal to "to abandon its anti-slavery positions."
In essence, this new report is merely a continuation of Barton's biased efforts to tie the history of the Democratic Party to slavery, Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan, and every other oppression suffered by African Americans in order to insinuate that the party maintains those views to this day.
Of course, as we've pointed out several times before, Barton's history lessons always seem to stop right around the time of the civil rights movement and the contemporaneous rise of the GOP's "southern strategy."
It is interesting that Wallbuilders, which bills itself as "an organization dedicated to presenting America's forgotten history," seems to be organizationally committed to intentionally forgetting the history of the last forty years.
