Yesterday on “WallBuilders Live,” David Barton and Rick Green discussed the case of Arizona pastor Michael Salman who has recently become a Religious Right cause célèbre because he is supposedly being persecuted simply because he wanted to hold Bible study meetings at his home.
In reality, Salman had been attempting to illegally build a church in his back yard and had been holding multiple-weekly church services on his property until he was found guilty of dozens of code violations and sentenced to sixty days in jail.
Barton took up the case today and voiced his outrage, calling on voters in Phoenix to work to remove political leaders in that city for allowing something like this to happen. Barton went on to falsely claim that Salman’s home was raided by a SWAT team sent to arrest him and said that law enforcement officers must refuse to participate in things like this because they have an obligation to uphold the Constitution:
And the one we have today, the one we’re going to talk about today is a great example is a bunch of political leaders in a city who need to be seriously removed. The fact that they would even think about enforcing this particular ordinance against anybody means that we’ve got a bad set of leaders there that need to be gone.
…
There needs to be some changes in Phoenix and people really do need to let city hall hear it over this. And I’m really concerned about cops who are willing to go in as a SWAT team to arrest a pastor who’s had Bible study. The cops should have said “no, we’re not doing that. I mean, we take an oath to uphold the Constitution too; there’s the right of assembly, the right of speech, the right of religion. We’re not going to go arrest this guy with AR-15s and a SWAT team.” At some point, citizens are going to have to say we’re not going to be part of this and that should have happened at this point.
