David Barton

Earlier today, David Barton tweeted that he was just about to start speaking at the Connect 2011 Pastors Conference, along with a link to watch him live.

So I clicked over and found him discussing how even though most Americans claim to be Christians, the culture is not being changed accordingly.  Barton cited a time in the past when the Chicago Tribune had published a new version of the New Testament and lamented that something like that could not happen today.  The solution, Barton asserted, is for Christians to take control of the culture and media so that "guys that have a secular viewpoint cannot survive" because Christians will "chop that kind of news off": 

At the end of his address, Barton urged those in attendance to go to his Black Robe Regiment website where they would find countless sample sermons on various issues so that they could speak out on every issue of the day.  The website also contains a video of Barton explaining just what sorts of sermons pastors of the Founding Era delivered, saying today's pastors need to follow their lead and deliver sermons on everything including voting, the military, taxes, health care, transportation, architecture, and even eclipses and earthquakes because the Bible has answer to everything:

With greater awareness among policymakers about the problem of pervasive anti-gay bullying in schools, the Religious Right has stepped-up their efforts to misleadingly label anti-bullying policies as “homosexual propaganda.” Focus on the Family warned of “activists who want to promote homosexuality in kids,” David Barton dismissed accounts of bullying and condemned alleged “homosexual indoctrination,” and the Minnesota Family Council blamed the LGBT community for bullying by endorsing an “unhealthy lifestyle.”

Now, the California Family Council (CFC) is escalating its own attacks against anti-bullying initiatives in schools. The CFC is affiliated with Focus on the Family and was highly involved in the campaign to pass Proposition 8. The CFC is now turning its attention to combating what it calls the new “cause célèbre of homosexual activists,” implementing anti-harassment policies. The CFC’s Rebecca Burgoyne spoke to the American Family Association’s news service OneNewsNow about their work fighting anti-bullying policies under the guise of protecting free speech:

A pro-family activist is taking to task a prominent homosexual-rights group for camouflaging its true agenda behind the banner of "bullying" in public schools.

Rebecca Burgoyne, research analyst with California Family Council, tells OneNewsNow that children across The Golden State are being indoctrinated with a pro-homosexual message. She maintains that the Obama administration and homosexual lobbyists are advancing an agenda that silences religious speech and the rights of parents.

"For many years, maybe a decade or so, gay activists in California have been making a big to-do about 'bullying' because of sexual orientation -- or even perceived sexual orientation," she explains. And the term "bullying," she argues, has become the elementary-level word for "hate speech."

January 24-28 marked "No Name-Calling Week" in public schools across the nation -- a week-long observance designed for fifth- through eighth-grade and sponsored by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN). While the observance claimed to be a week of educational and creative activities "designed to address bullying and end name-calling of all kinds," Burgoyne explains that the agenda behind it contains a decidedly pro-homosexual slant.

"Nobody wants a child to be bullied," she acknowledges. "Nobody wants a child to [be] hurt. Most people say 'Oh, great! We're teaching our children not to bully each other' -- which is a good thing. But it's being used instead to push the homosexual message."

In an article published on her group's website, Burgoyne notes that a young adult book featured during the week is The Misfits. The book, authored by an open homosexual, normalizes same-sex attraction, one character being an "openly homosexual seventh-grader who sees nothing wrong with being attracted to the boy who sits next to him in class."

The CFC research analyst contends that through such events as "No Name-Calling Week," homosexual activists are seeking to make same-sex attractions acceptable to young children -- while at the same time silencing the voice of other viewpoints.

The title of today’s Wallbuilders Live radio broadcast, brought to you courtesy of Religious Right “historian” David Barton, was “Why is Obama Trying to Remove God From the United States?”

Earlier this month we noted that the Arkansas Family Council had scheduled a two-day seminar for Arkansas legislators to be held today and tomorrow that was to be led by David Barton, who was going to teach them that helping the poor is not the government's responsibility.

But, at the last minute, Barton backed out without providing an explanation:

Evangelical activist David Barton has declined an invitation from the Family Council to speak to Arkansas lawmakers at the state Capitol, Family Council President Jerry Cox said Monday.

Cox said he did not know why Barton declined. The Family Council had reserved a room at the Capitol for Barton to hold a seminar today and Wednesday. The Christian conservative Family Council has no plans to reschedule the seminar, Cox said.

The zealous opposition to anti-bullying initiatives in schools from Religious Right groups is based on the premise that such programs are surreptitious ways to “promote homosexuality” or disseminate “homosexual propaganda” in schools. On WallBuildersLive, faux-historian David Barton and co-host Rick Green brought on Brian Camenker of the stringently anti-gay group MassResistance to discuss ways “homosexual activists” are the real bullies and manufactured the whole problem of bullying in the first place. With more scrutiny given to the problem of the pervasive harassment of LGBT students (including the case of one Minnesota teenager who committed suicide last week), right-wing groups and leaders have become even more fanatical in their hostility to anti-bullying programs.

Green and Camenker, who described gay-rights groups as “fascist,” agree that “homosexual activists” invented the problem of bullying and became the bullies themselves:

Camenker: It often takes parents standing up to the homosexual activists and it’s hard to do, but you’re right. This is a very aggressive, fascist type of movement and these guys define the term ‘bullies.’

Green: I think you’re right and the perception I guess and maybe a lot of teachers, principals, superintendents out there have bought into this perception is that they are only the ones being bullied, the homosexual lobby is, so they’re hypersensitive to the other side of it.

Barton later claims that “homosexual indoctrination” is found in the entire public school system and tells parents that they “better get on top of what’s being taught to your kids.”

Barton: There’s a whole lost of this that goes on that parents don’t even hear about but it is going on. All this bullying stuff, as Brian pointed out, it’s not the schools that are doing bullying, it’s the people from outside the schools coming in and saying “oh you got a bullying problem and we need to teach a course for you.” The people living there didn’t see any problem. But it’s these outside agenda-

Green: They’re the very thing they say they’re going in to stop is what they’re doing themselves.

Barton: They generate and start. It goes back to the question Jesus asks, “What’s it profit you to gain the whole world and lose your soul?” The question I gotta ask is, what’s it worth to you to gain everything you want and lose your kids?

Because unless you’re willing to monitor what’s going on in that classroom, I guarantee you they are getting homosexual indoctrination. I don’t care whether you’re in a rural area or not, because this is so much a part of textbooks, so much a part of curricular stuff, so much a part of what goes on with other kids. We see it too often in lawsuits, we hear of accounts like this, and we hear of dozens of other accounts where nothing’s ever done. You better get on top of what’s being taught to your kids.

• NOM pulled the Rhode Island ad off of YouTube, luckily it’s still on Good-As-You.

• The Supreme Court will rule soon on Bishop Harry Jackson’s petition to hear a case on the status of DC’s marriage equality law.

• Jim Garlow and California Republicans plan to rally against the ruling that the cross at the Mt. Soledad Veterans Memorial is unconstitutional.

• Liberty Counsel’s Mat Staver and “historian” David Barton are teaming up for “South Carolina Awake!”

• Apparently, a Tea Party Express fundraising email concerning the shooting in Tucson, Arizona is fine, but condemning violent language in politics is exploitation.

• Anti-Islam activist Debbie Schlussel can’t call herself “Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations” anymore.

• Speaking of anti-Islam activists, Pamela Geller wants New Yorkers to “Say Yes to Wal-Mart, No to the Mega Mosque.”

The other day we noted that the Arkansas Family Council is going to be bringing David Barton in to lead a two-day seminar for state legislators and government officials and explain to them that "helping the poor ... is primarily a function of the church," not government.

And indeed, the idea that it is not the government's responsibility to help the poor seems as if it is going to be one of the main points Barton intends to impart, as the AFC's Jerry Cox explained to Arkansas News columnist John Brummett:

Cox told me that Barton will not be lecturing these legislators on imposing Christianity on the government. Instead, he said, this highly polarizing Texan of dubious academic credentials will explain that some responsibilities belong to government, some to families and some to the church.

Quoting Barton from a recent lecture in Garland County, Cox said:

—Justice belongs to the government because a system of church punishment might bear alarming comparisons to inquisitions.

—Child rearing belongs to the family.

—Services for the poor and needy are the rightful responsibility of the church.

Interesting, isn't it, how Barton isn't going to churches with the message that it is their responsility to help the poor but is instead going to legislators with the the message that it is not their responsibility to help the poor?

Tom Minnery, Vice President of Government and Public Policy at CitizenLink (formerly Focus on the Family Action), is insisting that House Republicans investigate the Justice Department over their handling of the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, in order to fulfill the desires of the GOP’s Religious Right supporters.

Earlier this year, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley and Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders brought two separate cases to a federal judge in Boston contesting DOMA’s constitutionality. The Justice Department defended DOMA and argued that the law is constitutional, but the Judge ruled otherwise and found that the law was unconstitutional under the equal protection clause and the Tenth Amendment.

Infuriated by the judge’s ruling, Religious Right activists were so assured of DOMA’s constitutionality that they maintained that the Justice Department must have intentionally mishandled the cases and purposefully lost. Tom McClusky of the Family Research Council said that “in part, this decision results from the deliberately weak legal defense of DOMA that was mounted on behalf of the government by the Obama administration,” and Mat Staver of Liberty Counsel and David Barton of WallBuilders recently discussed why they believe the Justice Department “threw the case.”

Today, Focus on the Family’s Tom Minnery called for social conservatives to be more demanding of congressional Republicans than they were when Republicans previously had control of Congress:

On Nov. 2, 2010, the Republicans again won control of the House, by an even larger margin than they did in 1994. It was once again a severe rebuke of the policies of the Democratic Party. We hope it won’t again cause a severe misreading of results by conservative Christians. What we learned in 1994 was that simply having power isn’t enough. What matters is what is done with that power.

Minnery goes on to say that the Religious Right should push the House Committee On Oversight and Government Reform, to be led by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), to investigate the Justice Department’s management of the DOMA case to show that the GOP is serious about opposing marriage equality:

Will there be comprehensive hearings by House oversight committees on the unwillingness of the Justice Department to thoroughly defend, as the Constitution requires, legal challenges to federal laws? I have in mind the Defense of Marriage Act. The Justice Department has failed to provide an adequate defense against lawsuits seeking to tear away this law.

He also resuscitated the false claim that the government is using taxpayer funds to subsidize abortion, asking, “Will they try hard to undo health care reform, aiming specifically at its vast expansion of government-paid abortions?”

While Issa has already said that his committee may launch inquiries into everything from climate change science to consumer protection efforts to the Justice Department’s handling of the “New Black Panther Party” case, Minnery and other Religious Right activists will work to pressure Issa to include the DOMA cases among his growing lists of investigations.

David Barton was joined today by Rep. Randy Forbes (R-VA) to make patently false accusations about the Smithsonian and the recently censored Hide/Seek exhibit. Religious Right activists like Bill Donohue and Brent Bozell successfully pushed House Republican leaders John Boehner and Eric Cantor to threaten the Smithsonian’s funding over a video, A Fire in My Belly, which featured eleven seconds of a crucifix with ants on it. The video was about the struggle with AIDS, and it was far from the first time an artist used the image of Christ to display suffering and stigmatization. Ultimately, the Smithsonian censored the exhibit and pulled the video, but many right wing activists and Republican leaders want to strip the Smithsonian of its funding altogether and have the entire exhibit pulled.

Barton repeatedly falsely stated that Hide/Seek, which was about the struggle of gay and lesbian Americans, was actually a “Christmas exhibit” that was being paid for with tax dollars. However, Hide/Seek, which is in the National Portrait Gallery, is separate from the Smithsonian’s “Holidays on Display” exhibit, which is located in the National Museum of American History. Barton and his co-host Rick Green also wrongly maintained that the exhibit was “taxpayer funded,” even though Hide/Seek only used private funds and did not receive any taxpayer money.

Barton: If you go into the Smithsonian this year for Christmas, you'll find that the display is what they call "homoerotic," that is the title they give at the Smithsonian. And as you walk among, you get to see all these wonderful little pictures - and I'm not going to be real graphic, but I'm going to give you the tone of this - you take your family and you go through this nice little Christmas exhibit and, on look there, there's a picture of two naked brothers kissing - what a wonderful Christmas ... and there's Ellen DeGeneres, except she's grabbing her breast. And over here, look, there's Jesus on the cross, except he's covered with ants.

Green: This is not some private museum, this is the Smithsonian, paid for with tax dollars.

Barton: This is not a club that has a cover charge to it. This is the Smithsonian museum, this is their Christmas exhibit. Christmas exhibit!

Green: How demented do you have to be for this to be your Christmas exhibit? How messed up ...

Barton: Hold on, you got the wrong pronoun in there: how demented do we have to be, because we're the ones paying for this ... we're doing this guys, this is our Christmas exhibit that we have up at the nation's capital right now with our money. You and I have been paying money all year long so that this could be up at the Smithsonian.

Later, Barton claimed that the Smithsonian must regret hosting the Hide/Seek exhibit just like Satan regretted the crucifixion of Jesus:

Green: These people that are making these decisions, David, have they been inside the Beltway for so long and in their protected government job, only running around with their fellow liberals for so long, that they're that out of touch with the American people that they wouldn't realize that this is going to be grossly offensive to most Americans?

Barton: Well, there's two things going here - please tell me any homosexual-type activity that is not grossly offensive to most Americans, which is why they keep it out public view most times ... so it’s the kind of thing where they know it’s offensive but then every once in a while they feel emboldened. as they do right now with what’s been in DC for the last four years. They feel that hey, you know, the nation's finally caught up to us and then they do something stupid like this.

And I go back to Scripture where it says if Satan had known what would happen with crucifying Jesus, he never would have done it. It’s the kind of thing where they just miscalculate every once in a while, and I hope this is a miscalculation.

I love the fact that the new Speaker, [John] Boehner, jumped down their throats at the Smithsonian on this. He says, “You will get that out or you will not have funding, period.” They took it down within about 24 hours - they took part of it down, they still have a lot of it up. But they were showing videos - can’t even describe the videos - but this is part of the Christmas exhibit.

They still have the pictures up. Jesus is still up covered with ants on the cross, they still have all the sacrilegious stuff up, but they did take other stuff down. And they admitted that people coming through, virtually everybody was yelling at them for having it.

Of course, only one single person who actually saw the exhibit, which opened on October 30th, complained to the Smithsonian. The right wing activists and Republican leaders who demanded censorship admitted that they never visited the exhibit themselves, although A Fire in my Belly was censored following their outcry, despite Barton’s claim that “Jesus is still up covered with ants.”

Barton went on to compare the exhibit to child pornography and said he believes that the Smithsonian’s decision to host Hide/Seek was a result of the Obama Administration’s purported leniency to obscenity. Barton said that “since Obama has taken office and Holder as the Attorney General they have not prosecuted one obscenity case” since in their eyes “child pornography doesn’t exist” and “is fine.” But Barton’s allegation is completely untrue: Holder’s Department of Justice has been prosecuting such cases under Obama, and the National Law Journal reports that “in 2009, 20 defendants were charged with obscenity crimes.”