Posted on 10/13/2003 10:45:51 AM PDT by Between the Lines
A lot of accepted 'facts' about our Founding Fathers are not only wrong, they are outright lies and distortions of the truth.
When big national debates erupt in America, maybe over the California recall, or the Ten Commandments controversy in Alabama, the Founding Fathers usually get dragged into it, and they're usually misquoted and misused by liberals.
What would the founders have thought about the California recall? It's mob rule, liberals have said; not at all what the founders would have wanted. Not true, according to a leading authority on the founders.
Historian David Barton said, "The Founding Fathers would not have problems with recall. They believed that above all things that individuals should be accountable to the people at all times. They actually were having annual elections at the time of the Constitution, so it was a revolutionary thought to have two-year elections for members of congress. There was a lot of debate at that time saying, 'oh, those terms are too long, we don't need two years for members of Congress. We need to face every year.' So they don't have trouble with elections, and even frequent elections."
The California recall was almost de-railed by three liberal judges. Another liberal myth is that the courts are the final authority. But the Founding Fathers said that view is one of the biggest threats to liberty.
Thomas Jefferson wrote this to William Jarvis: "You seem to consider the judges as the final arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one that would put us under the despotism of an oligarchy."
Jefferson also said, "If our nation be destroyed, it would be from the judiciary."
The courts have systematically stripped religion from the public square, most recently in the Alabama Ten Commandment's case. That's based on another myth about the founders, the separation of church and state.
Barton said, "The Founding Fathers had no mindset of the separation of church and state in the way that we know of today. Their mindset was very narrowly defined. James Madison himself defined it when they wrote the First Amendment. We don't want a national denomination telling us what we all have to be...as they had in Great Britain, we're not going to have the federal government make us all Catholics, or all Anglicans, or all anything else. But the same people who did that, who gave us the First Amendment that has that form of separation also -- first act of Congress when they moved into the Capitol -- established that the Capitol building would serve simultaneously as a church building. So the largest church building in Washington, D.C. was one that met in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol. Over 2,000 people a week went to church there and these are the same guys who gave us the First Amendment."
Church in the Capitol Rotunda? But I thought the Founding Fathers were deists, agnostics and atheists. Another myth.
Barton said, "The Founding Fathers were overwhelmingly Christian…I love to spend time on the least religious founders. You have Franklin, as governor installs the Bible and Christianity in the public schools of Pennsylvania. Franklin was the man who made sure we had prayer at every session of Congress and that we had paid chaplains to do so."
Author Walter Isaacson said, "As he got near the end of his life, he said, 'I have to look back and say that Providence has been good to us and we really must praise Providence at all times and the work of the Lord."
Yeah, but what about Jefferson, the famous agnostic?
Barton said, "Jefferson expressed some doubts about the divinity of Christ. But what is never pointed out about Jefferson is the fact that he said that he expressed those doubts when he was in France and part of the time after he got home. And he said in those years he had studied the writings of David Hume, an atheist philosopher… so you have a period where Jefferson was anti-Christian, anti-religious. But at the end of his life, he never considered himself anything but an orthodox Christian…he thought of himself as a true Christian.
And George Washington never actually said he was a Christian, right? That's what some liberals are saying.
Barton said, "George Washington laid his hands and prayed for healing for people within the family and…Washington never missed church even though it was a five-hour ride to and from church on horseback or carriage. Never missed church, always read the Bible every day, always prayed everyday."
In the words of Washington's daughter Nelly, "You might as well question Washington's patriotism as to question his Christianity."
James Rees is the executive director of Mount Vernon, George Washington's home.
He said, "It's impossible to overstate how much George Washington's character and leadership formed this country and enabled it to stay the course to become the great country we are today."
But how could George Washington be any kind of example? He owned slaves. Walter Williams is a syndicated columnist, author and professor of economics at George Mason University.
Williams said, "Many of the founders, including Washington and Jefferson, although they had slaves, thought it was an abomination and hoped it would come to an end."
Barton said, "George Washington was given his slaves when he was 11 years old. That's how institutionalized slavery was…Washington released his slaves, released all his slaves…there's a real anti-slavery tone with the Founding Fathers. When we did separate from Great Britain in 1776, more than half the states abolished slavery --New York, Vermont, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania. Not every state did, you had four in the south that kept it. But you have a huge majority of Founding Fathers that were anti-slavery. Never owned slaves."
But the truth doesn't seem to dent the liberal view that America is a source of evil in the world.
Conservative author Dinesh D'souza said, "What other country in the world would have defeated Japan and Germany in World War II and rebuilt those countries. What country in the world goes to fight with another country, in this case Afghanistan, and in the middle of the fight is distributing food and rations to avert starvation among the civilians on the other side. No empire in all of human history has ever done this."
Bush said the same in a recent speech, "Our enemies sent other people's children on missions of suicide and murder. They embrace tyranny and death as a cause and a creed. We stand for a different choice made long ago on the day of our founding. We affirm it again today. We choose freedom and the dignity of every life."
Finally, today is Columbus Day, and a lot of liberals say we shouldn't be celebrating a genocidal maniac who is on par with Hitler.
As one liberal said, "Both of them were genocidal. Both of them were for the extermination and liquidation of a people--and a people who stood in the way of aggrandizement."
Columbus was brutal, but the empires he encountered were no less brutal. Some practiced human sacrifice on a huge scale. And Columbus historian Claudia Bushman says Columbus is still a worthy national symbol.
Bushman said, "I think Columbus was a very brave, intrepid sailor, that he was willing to try something no one else was willing to do. That he had vision far beyond others of his fellow man. On that basis he can be considered a great man. "
So, happy Columbus Day, America, and don't believe what some liberals are saying about this great nation.
You're right about Princeton, but, to be 100% accurate, it was called the College of New Jersey at the time. My screenname refers to Henry Lee II who, although a College of William & Mary man, sent his two oldest sons, "Light-Horse Harry" (Am. Rev. hero, governor of Va., U.S. Rep. from No. Va., and father of Robert E. Lee) and Charles (the second U.S. Attorney-General under Washington and Adams) to the College of N.J.
It's your belief that
"atheist" "liberals" are
destroying FR [!]
with "evolution?"
Wow. I think you should put that
in a thread itself!
We all know that heaven is exclusive not inclusive.
Of course it is bias. Does anyone check out where the articles come from anymore? The Christian Broadcasting Network. No one claimed it was non-bias.
From his own website:
http://www.wallbuilders.com/resources/search/detail.php?ResourceID=20
The only reason that page exists is because he was publishing those quotes as accurate. If he hadn't been questioned so vociferously, he wouldn't have needed to own up to poor scholarship.
Jefferson may have considered himself orthodox in his later years, but would most orthodox Protestant Christians have considered Jefferson one of their own? If you were a part of Jefferson's class and kin, formal Anglicanism (Episcopalianism) was the standard (Presbyterianism also might be acceptable), but the Unitarians claim Jefferson as one of their own.
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