Earlier this week, David Barton appeared on Missions Radio, where he doubled down on his false claim that the Supreme Court ruling striking down gay marriage bans has now legalized pedophilia, asserting that churches will be forced to hire child molesters to run their day care centers.
After repeating his false warning that gay marriage will lead to the elimination of gender-specific bathrooms and locker rooms, Barton claimed that the ruling, along with the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which he wrongly asserted was passed into law in 2006, will now also force churches to hire pedophiles.
“The Supreme Court said gender cannot be used as a basis of why you do things,” Barton said, “what you use is sexual identity. At this point, there are 82 distinct sexual identities … so whatever I identify myself as this morning, you now have legal standing for that. So what you’ve seen is, we used to have bathrooms based on gender, but you can’t identify gender so now you have to do no genders. So we’ve already seen in Utah that a number of guys have signed up and moved into the girl’s dorms and you can’t stop that because you can’t base it on gender any more. Well, guess what that’s going to mean for sports teams, guess what that’s going to mean for bathrooms all across the country, guess what that’s going to mean for all sorts of stuff.”
“And then, Congress has passed what’s called ENDA, Employment Non-Discrimination Act,” he continued, “passed this in ’06 under [Nancy] Pelosi and [Harry] Reid and at that point in time, it says you cannot discriminate on the basis of hiring. As a result, the president has now announced that faith based groups have to hire homosexuals; not an option, you have to because federal law says you cannot discriminate on the basis of identity. So if a pedophile comes to the church and says, ‘I want to run your nursery,’ you can’t say no because that’s discriminating on the basis of identity. If a homosexual comes and says, ‘I want to be your youth director’ and you say no, you can’t do that, you can’t distinguish on the basis of gender.”
As Warren Throckmorton pointed out, literally nothing Barton claimed is true:
No. Just no.
Barton is completely wrong about the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. It never passed both houses of Congress during the same session, and it is not law today. It was not introduced in the 109th Congress (2005-2007). As an aside, the House speaker during that Congress was Dennis Hastert and the Senate president was Dick Cheney. ENDA passed the House in the next Congress but not the Senate. Another version of the legislation passed the Senate in 2013 but not the House.
Barton told Mitchell’s audience that President Obama’s executive order forbidding discrimination by federal contractors came “as a result” of ENDA. Not so. Barton claims faith based groups have to hire homosexuals. However, this order only applies to federal contractors not all faith based groups. Then he uncorked a doozy by claiming that churches have to hire pedophiles who want to run church nurseries. Of course, this is ridiculous fear mongering.
Stop a minute to think about that claim. Anyone who has any knowledge of church work or volunteer work with children knows Barton’s claim is ridiculous. In many schools, you can’t volunteer to accompany your child’s classroom on a field trip without criminal and child abuse clearances. In recent years, churches have been required by liability insurers to screen all volunteers before working with children. Barton’s claims are absurd and irresponsible.
