If you’re not sure who David Barton is, think of Ken Ham or Kent Hovind: Barton is to history what old fashioned young earth creationists are to science. He peddles books and DVD’s riddled with fake quotes and other inaccuracies pushing the idea that America’s founders were really all about a Christian theocracy. Which is why Alabama Public TV recently passed on a suggestion to air two of Barton’s fake documentaries. I just got wind of what happened next:
SPLC— Immediately after meeting in executive session June 12, commissioners ordered APT Executive Director Allan Pizzato and his deputy, Pauline Howland, to clear out their desks and leave APT’s Birmingham headquarters. Pizzato had been APT executive director for 12 years; Howland was his deputy director and the network’s chief financial officer.
Pizzato would not comment on the reasons for the firing, other than to say commissioners were seeking to go in “a new direction.” But Howland, in an interview with Current.org, a news service of the American University’s School of Communication, said that Pizzato and his staff had “grave concerns” about airing the videos, which strongly advocate a religious interpretation of the past that historians say is simply wrong.
America, land of the free.
As our xian founding fathers would have wanted it. Amen.
Your one-stop shop for things Bartonesque (psst, look to yer left): http://freethoughtblogs.com/rodda
http://freethoughtblogs.com/rodda/2012/05/24/mikey-weinstein-responds-to-david-barton-calling-him-secretary-of-the-air-force/
http://freethoughtblogs.com/rodda/files/2012/05/y-u-no-tell-truth.jpg
http://freethoughtblogs.com/rodda/2012/05/13/how-big-of-a-liar-is-david-barton-you-aint-even-gonna-believe-this-one/
http://freethoughtblogs.com/rodda/2012/05/02/revisionism-a-willing-accomplice-the-remarkable-hypocrisy-of-david-barton-part-1/
In time-reverse order. There is more.
Explain this to a foreigner:
How is it a political argument what some people wanted and thought almost 300 years ago?
I can understand the interest in history but not how this applies to the present.
Whatever the “founding fathers” wanted is irrelevant when you want something else. They are dead, buried and rotten away. Who cares what they wanted with America?
I am dutch and I have never met anyone here that uses William of Orange’s or Thorbecke’s (perceived) opinions as an argument. Who would care?
@jeroenmetselaar:
In American culture generally (Due to bad education), and to a much more focused extreme in conservative culture specifically (Bad education and willful indoctrination), there are strong elements of hero worship or even saint-like veneration of the founding fathers. Hell, America’s own homegrown Christian sect, Mormonism, believes the founders were divinely inspired, and makes this part of official church doctrine (I believe a post on this issue has appeared here before; if not at Zingularity, then somewhere on FTB).
The reason it ends up being a political argument goes back to our founding document, the Constitution. As the “Supreme Law of the Land”, a lot goes into interpreting the Constitution. Because of the aforementioned hero worship of its authors, many, often referred to as “originalists”, believe that the Constitution should be an essentially unchanging document, based on some nebulous idea of what the founding fathers intended it to be. This group has a lot of pull with Republicans – when Democrats are in power. When Republicans are in power, they could care less about originalism, at least with regard to lawmaking.
Of course, the reality is that the founding fathers were huge on bickering among themselves over the meaning of the document they themselves wrote. But that kind of realistic view of history doesn’t allow deceptive conservatives to dupe poorly educated people into supporting an asinine standard of laws based on claiming that the latter groups heroes supported them.
@shockna
I see what you say but what I still don’t get is how people on the opposite react to this argument.
When someone argues X because $DEAD_BLOKE said so the sensible counter is not to claim $DEAD_BLOKE did not say so, the best argument is to dismiss the whole argument as irrelevant, as a stupid argument from authority.
Arguing the truth of $DEAD_BLOKE’s statement derails the debate on what is good policy today. What should be an argument on modern politics becomes an argument on history.
By going along with the argument you also give the impression the public that it matters while the real message should be that it doesn’t.
From where I sit it looks like a bait and switch trick. Don’t fall for it.
@jeroenmetselaar: We are talking here about people (creationists and their ilk) who are absolutely obsessed with “history” and the “truth” that lies therein. Remember that creationists fancy a litteral interpretation of the Bible, and think it’s a good idea to implement thousands of years old laws. Since they lack any form of rational thought, they can only justify their believes with what they think others have laid out for them. Hence the importance of the founding fathers’ goals when establishing the US: the conservative camp feels it ligitimizes, de facto, the establishing of their desired theocracy.
As for the Dutch situation, you should talk to conservatives from our own Bible belt, which are on par with the American right in crazyness, except they do it in a thorouglhy Calvinistic way, combined with traditional “verzuiling”, and hence they’re not as much in our face as the conservative right is in the States. But read this story, and tell me again there are no mentally deranged Dutch people…
Nice straw man you got there, watch out with matches please.
I never argued any type of nationalistic grand standing or that we don’t have our own set of idiots. You get those buggers everywhere.
I wasn’t even questioning why or how the dominionist position works. What I question is why people even react to it in any other way than dismissing it as an irrelevant argument.
Watching journalism and the news media over the last couple of decades has been like watching the tide come up on a sandcastle in slow motion. Ah Billy Clinton, you done went and signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 with nary a peep. You signed it and smiled. Pardon my nostalgia for the good old days of news that at least made an effort to give the appearance of being trustworthy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there were biases aplenty, but there was something of substance there. Suddenly there were whole networks of crap and propaganda masquerading as news. And then the mainstream outlets began to collapsed, sucked dry by the greed of the market. Still, public television and radio soldiered on, while there were efforts made to cut their gov’t funding. You can’t fight when you are starving to death. So now we are watching those last towers start to fall. It was simply a matter of undermining the foundation.
A free press is necessary for democracy to work. A real free press is an unruly and lively thing. It is also, it turns out, delicate enough that it takes the will of a very few very rich people to eradicate it.
It makes my soul feel soggy and overwhelmed with queasiness. Actual history, actual science, that is for the elites. And they’ve convinced the masses to believe it’s just the way they want it. Because public TV is listener supported. If the pledges keep coming in after this debacle, well, geez. Because there is no better way to express approval than by picking up the tab.
And there are times when you have to dig in and fight.
I wish PBS was even tougher on the shows. They aired that “Secrets of the Dead” series which is barely better than “ancient aliens” and other drivel shown on the Science or History channels. Look at the comments by professors on the episode that is about Crete and the decline of the Minoans for a good example of PBS allowing a show with flash and controversy to take precedence over scholarship.
jeroenmetselaar
A big part of it is probably that we are based on Common Law (except Lousianna which is based on French law). In Common Law countries, our laws and interpretations of laws are based on tradition. That is a gross oversimplification, but explains how courts decide things, and how laws progress.
To a certain extent, every society is based on Tradition, but in Common Law countries we actually encodify it.
So, for some things we can say “who cares”, but for others not, especially when it comes to government powers and civil rights from a legal perspective.
jeroenmetselaar @ # 6: … the best argument is to dismiss the whole argument as irrelevant, as a stupid argument from authority.
Logical fallacies – and that one in particular – somehow never make it into the curriculum (as an object of study per se that is – the fallacies themselves, particularly authority, pop up everywhere).