Last week, David Barton participated in a conference call for Champion The Vote, the Religious Right election effort that seeks to register and mobilize millions of Christian voters because “it only takes 5 million votes to decide an election.”
During the call, Barton set out a pretty simple rule to help conservative Christians determine how to cast their ballots: vote the Ten Commandments:
Now you take the Ten Commandments and look at them and there are certain issues that do appear there. One is the public acknowledgement of God, that’s the first thing off. So when there’s a difference between candidates on whether God should be mentioned in public, if one of them wants a secularization of the public square, the other says “no, God needs to be acknowledged,” that’s a big deal, that’s one of God’s top ten issues.
You’ll find that also in the top ten, don’t shed innocent blood. Well, that goes to abortion.
You’ll also find in the top ten that God says “I want you keep marriage the way I told you it was back in Genesis.” Hey, the marriage issue makes the top ten.
What doesn’t make the top ten is the environment or helping the poor or energy or whatever. So if we take other issues and raise them above God’s top ten, then we have usurped what God has told us in the Scriptures and what God told his nation: “I’ve given you 613 laws, but here’s my prioritization; these are the most important ones.” So we need to vote with that cognizance.
As we’ve noted before, marrige in the Book of Gensis consisted mainly of polygamy and/or some form of incest … but we are pretty sure that is not what Barton had in mind.
