On Friday, Republican political operative and Religious Right pseudo-historian David Barton appeared on the American Pastors Network’s “Stand In The Gap” radio program to discuss President Trump’s plans to “make America great again.”
During the discussion, Barton was asked how the Founding Fathers would have felt about Trump’s plan to implement “extreme vetting” of immigrants and refugees from predominantly Muslim nations. Barton said that the Founders would have supported such a move because, while America has always been very open about accepting immigrants and refugees, we only accepted those who intended to become Americans by assimilating into our Judeo-Christian society.
America no longer requires that, Barton lamented, saying that educators in the 1920s stopped looking at people as individuals and started placing everyone into groups. The result, he said, is that today white Christians such as himself have fewer rights than everyone else (Ironically, it was U.S. immigration policy before 1965 that placed immigrants into groups, prioritizing western and northern Europeans over others.)
“Every item in the Bill of Rights is given to every individual, it’s not given to groups,” he said. “But today, the Supreme Court says the purpose of the Bill of Rights is to protect the minority from the majority. Now how stupid is that? Because I’m in the majority as a white guy, do I not get the right to a trial by jury, do I not get the right to free speech? No, because I’m in the wrong group. And so, what happens is even back in 1992, in a Supreme Court case I was involved with, the court at the time created classes of religions and if you’re in Christianity, that’s the biggest religion so we give you the least protection. But if you’re in a small religion, we’ll give you more protection than anyone else.”
