2014 was another banner year for David Barton, who once again managed to continue to spread his particular brand of Christian America pseudo-history and patently absurd statements around the world while somehow maintaining his reputation as a well-respected Religious Right activist and speaker.
Seemingly no amount of nonsense from Barton can diminish his standing among conservative Christian activists, so it was not particularly surprising to see him spend 2014 spreading misinformation and shoddy history without consequence.
Barton’s quasi-theocractic political philosophy was at work throughout the year as he tried to argue that the Bible was the basis of our Constitution and warned Christians that not voting is evil because America’s prosperity depends upon electing senators who will confirm godly judges.
Failure to do so, he warned, causes the entire nation to suffer.
Ungodly leaders like President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry, Barton said, are incapable of fighting terrorism because they have no moral compass. Even worse, their failure to adequately support Israel will result in God striking America with natural disasters.
After rejecting an effort to draft him to run for the U.S. Senate, Barton amazingly had no qualms about lecturing everyone else that refusing to run for office when asked is “pure selfishness.” We can only guess what sort of legislation Sen. Barton would have proposed, given that he has repeatedly argued that the Bible should be the foundation of public education (which could go a long way toward explaining why Barton himself is apparently so bad at math.)
In addition to asserting that the Founding Fathers did not allow women to vote in order to “keep the family together,” Barton also argued that Christians in America “have an inalienable right to marriage to be a man and a woman and no other combination.”
Barton also praised Phil Robertson of “Duck Dynasty” for being “quite graphic” when making controversial anti-gay statements because, in doing so, he made homosexuality seem “very repugnant, which is what it should be.”
Predictably, Barton was once again a reliable source of a variety of laughably absurd assertions this year, such as the claim that families on welfare receive $61,000 a year in government benefits and his declaration that America must have “a biblical view on computer programming.” But those pale in comparison to Barton’s ridiculous claim that the Founding Fathers were well-versed in the theory of evolution and openly rejected it because it had really been established in 500 B.C.
Perhaps the most amazing feat Barton managed to pull of in 2014 was the invention of time travel, because that seems to be the only possible way in which he could manage to speak to more than 600 groups every year while also working fourteen hours a day on his ranch.
