Glenn Beck University

One of the professors of Glenn Beck University is James R. Stoner. Another professor of Glenn Beck University is David Barton. Below is an old post I wrote about Barton in 2005.

Who Is David Barton

David Barton is a man that most people have never heard of. He is the founder of WallBuilders. The organization bills itself as "presenting America's forgotten history and heroes, with an emphasis on our moral, religious, and constitutional heritage. Barton's bio on Wallbuilders states his background as an author and historian.

In the book The Myth of Separation, Barton quotes James Madison:

We have staked the whole future of American civilization not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government, upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments.

The problem is there is no known source for this quote. Barry Hankins reported that, noted Madison expert, Professor Robert Alley could find no such Madison quote. Barton wrote an extremely defensive piece against the Hankins article. Barton wrote that the quote was not "inaccurate." He would no longer use the quote "because it was inaccurate but rather because I had determined to raise the scholarship of the debate from an academic level to the higher level of legal documentation known as 'best evidence' - a level of documentation that most of those in your camp have yet to embrace."

During the nineties, Barton became involved in Texas politics. Barton sat on the National Platform Committee for the Republican Party in 1997. Tom Delay started attending religious events that Barton spoke at. Barton later became Vice-Chairman of the Texas GOP. The Republican National Commitee hired Barton as a political consultant.

Max Blumenthal in the Nation wrote:

The recent right-wing fixation on impeaching judges was conceptualized by David Barton, Republican consultant and vice chairman of the Texas GOP. In 1996 Barton published a handbook called Impeachment: Restraining an Overactive Judiciary which was timed to coincide with Tom DeLay's bid for legislation authorizing Congress to impeach judges. "The judges need to be intimidated," DeLay told reporters that year.

Delay wanted to impeach Supreme Court Justices who ruled in the majority of the Romer v. Evans case.

Colorado passed Amendment 2.

Colorado voters adopted Amendment 2 to their State Constitution precluding any judicial, legislative, or executive action designed to protect persons from discrimination based on their "homosexual, lesbian, or bisexual orientation, conduct, practices or relationships." Following a legal challenge by homosexual and other aggrieved parties, the state trial court entered a permanent injunction enjoining Amendment 2's enforcement. The Colorado Supreme Court affirmed on appeal.

The Supreme Court ruled that the "State's principal argument that Amendment 2 puts gays and lesbians in the same position as all other persons by denying them special rights is rejected as implausible." Barton wrote, "In Romer v. Evans, the courts overturned a constitutional amendment approved by Colorado citizens to forbid awarding special, rather than just equal, rights to homosexuals." That is an interesting line of argument from a man who was paid by the RNC to campaign against gay marriage.

Barton likes to quote and misquote the Founding Fathers. Perhaps he should take heed to this quote by Thomas Jefferson.

That even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion, is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness, and is withdrawing from the Ministry those temporal rewards which, proceeding from an approbation of their personal conduct, are an additional incitement to earnest and unremitting labour for the instruction of mankind: That our civil rights have no dependance on our religious opinions, any more than on our opinions in physicks or geometry: That therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the publick confidence, by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which, in common with his fellow citizens he has a natural right: That it tends also to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess and conform to it: That though indeed these are criminal who do not withstand such temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way.

Barton has made a lucrative career as a GOP consultant and on the religious lecture circuit. No wonder he is doesn't believe there should be a separation between church and state.

Update: Talking Points Memo is attending Glenn Beck University. Barton lectured about how the Founding Fathers wanted a Christian influence.

The Declaration of Independence is nothing more than a listing of all of the sermons that folks had been hearing in church in the decades leading up to the American Revolution.

Forget about America declaring independence from King George III. The Declaration of Independence was just a written sermon. Got it.