Janet Parshall

On Monday, Janet Parshall hosted David Barton to use Martin Luther King Jr. Day as an opportunity for Barton to spew his right-wing reading of U.S. history and the Constitution. While Barton does not have degrees in history or law, he claimed that the theory of evolution was responsible for the Supreme Court’s ruling in Everson v. Board of Education, which found that the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause applies to the states because it was incorporated by the Fourteenth Amendment — because it led to legal positivism.

As Barton explains, law students who learned about the theory of evolution, which he objects to since he believes the Founders settled “the entire debate on creation and evolution” and opposed the theory, consequently believed that the Constitution should evolve, and in turn made the Establishment Clause apply to the states. Barton has consistently opposed the Supreme Court’s definition of the Establishment Clause and its application to states and localities, even going as so far to tell Jon Stewart that he believes cities can even implement Sharia law, although he later denied saying it.

Barton: This may sound weird but it was the theory of evolution, we think it’s a science debate it is not, if you apply the theory of evolution to law you say, ‘wait a minute we can’t be bound by a two hundred year old document, we’ve evolved past that, what we need to have is an evolving document that meets the needs of society today and who best to evolve the document but judges, they’re the ones who deal with the law,’ so we got into this thing of what’s called legal positivism or evolutionary law, living constitution, and we started teaching that in the law schools in the 1920s. Take kids in the law schools in the 20s and, get this, they’re now in legal practice in the ’30s and now in the ’40s they’re adults with twenty years under their belt and they get appointed to the US Supreme Court and so in ’47 they simply implemented what they’ve been taught in law school twenty-five years earlier.

Liberty Counsel chairman Mathew Staver appeared on In the Market with Janet Parshall to discuss the organization’s latest case against Macy’s, which terminated an employee, Natalie Johnson, for refusing to follow company policy regarding the rights of LGBT customers. Staver, who last week told Vic Eliason of VCY America that the case is a result of the “LGBT sexual anarchist agenda gone awry” and that adults will begin identifying as children so they “can go and use the little kiddies restroom,” contended that the trans-friendly policy could lead to an increase in rape and sexual assaults as women in fitting rooms now “may be watched by a peeping tom or even worse, sexually assaulted or raped.” He went on to say that people who are transgender are similar to anorexics and bulimics, and do not deserve legal rights.

Staver: But even if they bring Natalie back that fixes one problem, but the big problem and the major problem is this policy. As you mentioned before the break, this really puts every woman at risk. A father doesn’t want to take his twelve, thirteen year-old daughter there to go to Macy’s and let her go into a woman’s fitting room, not knowing whether there may be some pedophile, pervert, or some other kind of person who’s waiting to do a sexual assault on this young woman, or your wife. Any woman does not want to go into a men’s restroom, a men’s fitting room, or a woman’s fitting room, thinking that they may be watched by a peeping tom or even worse, sexually assaulted or raped, and in fact this is a liability waiting to happen and Macy’s needs to fix this problem.

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We’re going to see this unless we ultimately wake up and stop this radical agenda, because what this so-called movement, they keep changing the alphabet around, now it’s LGBT and it’s LGBTQ, and now I just came across LGBTQQI, there’s all kinds of new alphabets to this, bottom line is this though: they believe that you should be able to be anyone you want to be in your mind. So, objective biology and physiology, how you’re actually born and how you look, really doesn’t make any difference. What makes a difference is what you think in your mind. It’s kind of like anorexic bulimia, obviously someone they believe they are overweight when they’re really not, here, if they believe that they are a woman and they’re really a man, well instead of addressing the issue, they want you to have some legal protection for it.

Robert Spencer took to In The Market with Janet Parshall yesterday to decry the purported adoption of Islamic law in America as proved by a hotel’s decision to cancel a conference featuring Spencer, Pamela Geller and other anti-Muslim activists. Spencer again accused progressive groups, namely the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League, of promoting “smears and defamation,” arguing that “far-left groups” are “enemies of free speech and are in league with Islamic supremacists to curtail our freedom of speech and to demonize and to marginalize anybody that dares to speak the truth about jihad and Islam.” Spencer, who frequently rails against the civil rights of Muslims, went on to say that Americans have become victims of the “self-enforcement of Islamic law and the internalization of Islamic norms.”

Steve Eckley, who is some sort of functionary in Amerimar Enterprises, which is the corporation which owns the Hutton Hotel in Nashville, and he told reporters that he was cancelling the conference because my colleague Pamela Geller and I were speaking, he singled us out. Even though there was a large roster of speakers, lots of people speaking, he picked us out and mentioned us both by name, nobody else, and said that the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League had complained about us and that that was another reason he was dropping the conference. This is actually even more disturbing because not only is he caving into threats but he is accepting, uncritically, these simply smears and defamation by far-left groups that are enemies of free speech and are in league with Islamic supremacists to curtail our freedom of speech and to demonize and to marginalize anybody that dares to speak the truth about jihad and Islam. So he is just furthering their narrative and abetting its spread by banning the conference, but that was what he said.

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It’s the self-enforcement of Islamic law and the internalization of Islamic norms of what’s acceptable to speak about and what isn’t. And American authorities like this sap at the hotel are willingly and unwittingly obeying and toeing the line, and not realizing that once we start down that road, pretty soon quite a few more of our freedoms are going to be eroded away than he probably expects.

Calvin Beisner of the Cornwall Alliance appeared on Janet Parshall’s radio show In The Market on Tuesday to discuss the “Green Dragon” film series which was made by Beisner’s group and hosted by Parshall. As we discussed in our report The ‘Green Dragon’ Slayers: How the Religious Right and the Corporate Right are Joining Forces to Fight Environmental Protection, the “Green Dragon” series represents efforts by the Religious Right and the Corporate Right to paint environmentalism as anti-Christian and ungodly:

During the radio show, Parshall played clips from the “documentary,” including one from Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, who argues that in the name of “population control” the government will eventually push “infanticide” and promote “same-sex relations”:

Perkins: Population control is a very loaded term. It includes not only abortion, contraception and sterilization, all at government expense of course, but it also includes infanticide and the promotion of same-sex relations. At the heart of this push for population control is an unbiblical view of children and of life.

Another clip featured right-wing pseudo-historian David Barton. Barton, who has made a career of infusing Religious Right beliefs into politics and American history, accused environmentalism of being “a religion” with its own rules and “high priests,” and went on to tell people to contest environmental beliefs because “that’s not science, that is the faith position that you’re taking”:

Barton: People say that environmentalism is a religion. Others say, ‘Oh no, that’s not true,’ but it really is. Now how do we know? I’ve been involved in seven cases at the US Supreme Court and I can point to a number of court decisions where the court has said religion is whatever you believe so strongly that it affects the way you live your life. That’s why the court recognizes even atheism as a religion. Environmentalism definitely is a religion, it has its own high priests, it has folks that tell us what we can and can’t do with the environment and how we can treat it and they’re the guardians of it as if it’s a great temple. It’s a religion. And as soon as we recognize that environmentalism is a religion then it helps us to understand better how to respond to what’s being said, how to filter what’s being said, and say, now wait a minute, that’s not science, that is the faith position that you’re taking.