A college psychology professor's observations about public policy, mental health, sexual identity, and religious issues
Tune in to the first hour (around 35 minutes in) of All Things Considered to hear a profile by Barbara Bradley Hagerty of David Barton with John Fea, Ray McMillian (one of the pastors boycotting Thomas Nelson), Mat Staver and me talking about Barton’s history.
After the show airs, I will post links to the audio and a web page highlighting Barton’s claims vs. reality.
An expanded article based on the audio segment is here.
A group of evangelical pastors in Cincinnati says a popular but controversial book about Thomas Jefferson rewrites history and excuses the founding father for owning slaves.
Subtitled, “Christian critics challenge WallBuilders president on America’s founders,” this World Magazine article by Thomas Kidd (Baylor University) opens the door on a controversy that has been building for the past several months.
Several weeks ago, Jay Richards, Fellow at the Discovery Institute, began a process of asking conservative professors to read our book along with Barton’s materials. Kidd explains
Jay W. Richards, senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, and author with James Robison ofIndivisible: Restoring Faith, Family, and Freedom Before It’s Too Late, spoke alongside Barton at Christian conferences as recently as last month. Richards says in recent months he has grown increasingly troubled about Barton’s writings, so he asked 10 conservative Christian professors to assess Barton’s work.
I am not going to give any additional quotes because I want you to go read the entire piece at World.
Tomorrow, look for another major media segment on this topic. I will have it here as soon as it comes out.
This week, Michael Coulter and I are going to present a series of reactions to an eight minute YouTube video of David Barton’s Capitol Tour. Sponsored by the Family Research Council, the video provides narration from Barton speaking in the Rotunda of the Capitol. First, I am going to revisit Barton’s fable about Jefferson and the Kaskaskia Indians. I wrote about the Kaskaskia treaty last year and we cover it in our book Getting Jefferson Right. In his book The Jefferson Lies, Barton uses the Kaskaskia story as evidence that Jefferson supported missionary work to Indians. Barton also points to the Kaskaskia treaty as an indication that Jefferson supported government sponsored religious activities. Here is the video (this version has 3.7 million views):
In his Capitol tour, Barton makes a little different claim about the Kaskaskia treaty than he does in The Jefferson Lies. On the tour at 6:45, Barton says:
Most people have no clue that Thomas Jefferson in 1803 negotiated a treaty with the Kaskaskia Indians in which Jefferson put federal funds to pay for missionaries to go evangelize the Indians and gave federal funds so that after they were converted we’d build them a church in which they could worship.
One reason people have no clue about this story is that it didn’t happen that way.
A new study from Gerulf Rieger and Ritch Savin-Williams confirms the relationship between sexual desire and pupil dilation. While this relationship has been known for some time, now it is possible to measure the dilation with precision. In doing so, the authors report significant relationships between self-reported sexual orientation and the way pupils dilate in response to sexual imagery.
Read a summary of the study here, and the open access journal report here.
The authors report that males are more clear in their preferences than women, meaning that whether gay or straight, the dilation of their pupils matched closely their stated preferences. Women were more likely than men to show pupil dilation to both preferred and non-preferred images. Bisexuals also showed dilation to both male and female sexual images.
The results are not perfect in that there is variability of pupil response within sexual orientation groups. These results say nothing about causes of orientation but they do provide more evidence that the attraction component of sexual orientation is mostly involuntary.