DAVID BARTON TO VISIT MY HOMETOWN…
0900 by Jeff HessAs election time approaches, political organizations and their candidates usually try to dodge labels and avoid controversy, but, to their credit, the members of the Washington County Republican Executive Committee have apparently decided to (as military parlance suggests) “embrace the suck”, and engage in total truth-in-advertising (a rare move indeed for local Republicans). By selecting noted fundamentalist guru David Barton as the keynote speaker at their 2014 fall dinner, they are proving beyond all doubt that their critics have been correct all along in saying that the once-Grand Old Party has been entirely co-opted by extremists and fanatics.
David Barton is what might be called an “all-purpose zealot”. In the 1990s he founded “Wallbuilders”, a group that promotes what Barton likes to call a “Christian world-view”. It is one that excludes anything in science, government, entertainment, literature, or history that does not conform with the narrow views that he and his (actually quite small) group of disciples want to promote. He has collaborated with James Dobson’s Family Research Council , A.L.E.C. (American Legislative Exchange Council), and other anti-women, anti-poor, anti-worker, anti-science groups with similar agendas. Along the way, he joined the “faculty” of the online “Glenn Beck University”, an institution (sic) that might not secure students a secure job in academia, but could enable them to become suitable candidates for future mental-health evaluation.
Like his cohort, college dropout Glenn Beck, Barton has now branched out into claiming himself as an “authority” on all aspects of history, a subject that he feels his limited credentials from Oral Roberts University entitle him to twist and re-invent as he pleases. This is despite the fact that most real historians have denounced him as a fraud and charlatan, and at least one of his books (“The Jefferson Lies”) has been recalled by its N.Y. publisher because it was found to be full of gross inaccuracies. Barton decided to re-write Thomas Jefferson’s “Letter to the Danbury Baptists,”, the document where the latter coined the phrase “a wall separating church and state,” and to suggest (falsely) that the nation’s founders really wanted America to be a theocracy. As at least one recent Times letter-writer has noted, Barton is a dedicated homophobic (he has been recorded as saying, among other things, that “homosexuality should be outlawed”) and borderline racist. He denies that the Republican 1960s “southern strategy” profited from defections to their ranks by “Dixiecrats” like Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms after President Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act into law. He has also called President Franklin D. Roosevelt an “abject failure”, and has denounced Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson as “traitors to the American Dream.”
Lately, Barton has been promoting a blatant anti-science agenda that denies both evolution and climate-change (can gravity be far behind?), despite the fact that these theories have been consistently validated by thousands of qualified specialists via years of empirical research and experimentation. It comes as no surprise that Barton’s appearance in Marietta is being touted to coincide with 95th District State Representative Andy Thompson’s newly-introduced HB-597, an item of legislation that goes well beyond the intent of Thompson’s earlier HB-237 to “void” Common Core standards in Ohio, and becomes an undisguised attempt to replace all scientific principles with faith-based propaganda in Ohio’s public and private schools.
David Barton is also the founder of “Veritas Press”, the publishing firm that produced the controversial creationist/revisionist textbooks adopted in 2012 by the Texas Board of Education. It might be noted that “supplementary material” from this same company is being promoted (for a price) among advocates of home-schooling and in certain private “academies” whose desire is to avoid compliance with any and all standards and practices that these folks fear might upset their essentially propagandist agenda. Barton’s website is called “Veritas Rex”. Does that phrase “ring a bell”? “Caveat emptor!”
At the September 19 dinner, I hear that local Republicans will unveil their new campaign slogan—“Party like it’s 1499.”
This is the unedited version of Fred O’Neill’s letter-to-the-editor published this morning in GOP speaker isn’t known as a forward thinker
