Meet David Barton, Bachmann’s constitution class teacher

[Joanne98]

Rep. Michele Bachmann announced last month that she wants to hold “Constitution classes” for new members of Congress in the hopes of preventing them from being “co-opted into the Washington system.” She’s already announced several people she wants to teach the classes, including David Barton, a controversial figure whose ideas about the constitution and the founding fathers have drawn sharp criticism from both the religious and secular communities.

“Every week the hour before we take our first votes, we have our weekly class so that we are reminded of our constitutional jurisdictional limits,” Bachmann told Glenn Beck in a recent radio interview. She mentioned Barton as a key figure in those weekly classes.

Bachmann and Barton have a long relationship going back to Bachmann’s time as state senator. Barton was invited to Minnesota to help Bachmann with legislation on school history standards, she’s appeared his radio show numerous times and she and Barton have conducted tours in Washington, D.C., to demonstrate to tea partiers how religious the Founding Fathers were.

But Barton, who has said the idea of separation of church and state is a myth, has garnered his fair share of controversy. He has suggested the federal government should regulate homosexuality, and his association with reported anti-Semitic groups prompted the Anti-Defamation League to condemn him earlier this year. In the 1990s, he spoke to the Christian Identity Movement, a group that “asserts that Jews are ‘the synagogue of Satan’; that Blacks and other people of color are subhuman; and that northern European whites and their American descendants are the ‘chosen people’ of scriptural prophesy.”

http://minnesotaindependent.com/73958/meet-david-barton-bachmanns-constitution-class-teacher

[monmouth]

1. All of this blatant stupidity is really giving me a headache....n/t

[Joanne98]

2. Sorry.

[monmouth]

3. Not your OP Joanne, the stupids that say this stuff....n/t

[haele]

4. I remember watching Barton and all the historians of rec.hist.american

going 'round and 'round during the bad old days of USENET. Barton would make some pissant claim about Jefferson or Madison (usually) and what they really meant, and five or six tenured members of the History Departments of, oh, William and Mary, or Princeton, or University of Virginia would jump down his throat with copies of original letters and writings from the subject or his contemporaries.
It was always about "Church and State", and how America was supposed to be a Godfearing, Christian Nation (apparently of the Southern Bab'tist/Calvinist bent - he also would quote Locke and Calvin and claimed that their philosophy was pivitol and obvious in the Constitution...) and that the Founding Fathers would be livid that we were straying from our Christian Roots.

Oh, and the Treaty of Tripoli was little more than lip-service to the Muslims to stop the fighting; Adams was a oddity, being a Pacifist Quaker type, of course. If Washington was still President, we woulda wooped their asses, and the treaty would be to take some of that area for ourselves as a territory.

If it was a subject that made his point, he was a great researcher. But he did have a problem with documents that did not agree with his claim.

Haele