Recently, David Barton told an audience that violent crime in Las Vegas has declined 75% due to the use of biblical principles by that city’s police department and churches. Listen (clip courtesy of Right Wing Watch):
There are so many problems with his analysis that it is hard to know where to begin. On the matter of religious schools and achievement, Barton completely ignores the fact that those who attend religious schools have been chosen to go there. The students have not been randomly assigned to public versus private schools for a fair comparison. The private schools can eliminate students who aren’t performing well or misbehaving, and they don’t have to worry about providing an education for students with disabilities or learning disorders. Private schools can select their students to create a higher achieving result.
Because the claim about Las Vegas crime rates is a new one, I decided to check it out with the Las Vegas Police Department. Lo and behold, Barton is again wrong.
Barton told the Patriot and Preacher radio audience:
But when God is reintroduced back into policy, for instance, in Las Vegas, the churches there worked with the police department to teach morals in the city, the violent crime rate has gone down 75 percent in Las Vegas by the reintroduction of biblical teachings back in the city through the police department and the churches.
I sent the above audio to the Las Vegas PD Office of Public Information and asked if Barton’s claims were true. About the claim of a 75% decline in crime, Officer Rodriquez said flatly, “That is not true.”
Rodriguez added, “Sadly, we’re seeing an increase in violent crime year to date as compared to the same period last year.” For the calendar year 2016 thus far, homicide is up 79% over last year (1/1 — 3/16/15). Violent crime overall is up 24.8% in Las Vegas as compared to the same period in 2015.
While the LVPD collaborates with faith based groups around Las Vegas, Rodriguez said “officers are not preaching and teaching the Bible” in the community. Furthermore, the department collaborates with all religious groups in the same manner. They work with Jewish, Muslim, and other non-Christian groups to build bridges.
Not surprisingly, Barton’s claims about crime in Las Vegas fail the fact checking test.
Mostly, this would be an annoyance if not for the fact that David Barton advises Ted Cruz. I am working on a post which demonstrates that Barton and Cruz promote very similar incorrect facts about climate change. Cruz has been known to play a little fast and loose with the facts and he uses Glenn Beck as a surrogate. It is one thing to simply be mistaken, it is another thing when those easily debunked falsehoods make it into policy provisions. Can you imagine a David Barton appointment to a policy making post in a Cruz administration? I can imagine needless fact-free debates over AIDS, PTSD, climate change, crime rates, etc.
Once upon a time, Ted Cruz Super PAC head David Barton believed Marco Rubio’s gay-marriage-supporting staff would cause Rubio problems with conservatives.
Now that Ted Cruz is being associated with dominionists and Pentecostals by Matt Drudge, Barton now thinks guilt by association is “ridiculous.” This evening, Barton was featured in a damage control piece at Cruz Net Daily:
Barton condemned any use of “guilt by association” tactics on the Right, by anyone, and was equally critical of similar attacks that might be levied against Trump, Marco Rubio and other candidates.
“Look at Rubio’s funders; so many of them are supporters of gay marriage,” said Barton as an example. “So do we read into that that Rubio is a pusher of gay marriage? No, that’s not a fair read. You’ve got 330 million people in the United States. Are we going to look at every voter who might vote for Trump, or Rubio, or Cruz, or for Kasich and say, ‘Well, look at what this voter believes, that’s ridiculous.’
A little closer to home for me is Barton’s love of guilt by association when he attempts to discredit my debunking of The Jefferson Lies. About me, he told World Net Daily:
Reflective of the change in Throckmorton’s overall philosophy is the fact that he currently writes for the progressive Huffington Post,[22] even though in 2008, he attacked that site as being part of the “far Left.”[23] He also now regularly contributes to Salon,[24] another of the nation’s most progressive and liberal news organizations. Furthermore, two of the nation’s most secular groups, “Americans United for Separation of Church and State” and People for the American Way’s “Right Wing Watch” praise Throckmorton’s current writings and cite him as an expert in promulgating their beliefs.
Barton says I am a liberal because I have written for HuffPo and Salon (and it is a stretch to say I ever “regularly” contributed to Salon). He has to turn me into a liberal to sell his false narrative about The Jefferson Lies being the victim of liberal attacks. As I have written previously here, that story is false. For the purpose of defending his book, guilt by association is Barton’s operating procedure.
On the specific point of Cruz’s beliefs, I wish reporters would ask him about his various “anointings.” His religion is not a Constitutional barrier to seeking office but his beliefs might make some people think twice about voting for him. Given the views of his advisors (including his father), it is only fair to know how he believes those beliefs will guide him as president.
Despite numerous factual accounts of what happened to the two White House statues of Winston Churchill, Ted Cruz repeated a debunked story during Thursday’s GOP presidential debate which has been around since the early days of Obama’s first term. Here is what Cruz said last night:
CRUZ: Of course it does. And we’ve seen for seven years a president that has made the presidency and has made, sadly, his administration a laughing stock in the world. This administration started with President Obama sending back the bust of Winston Churchill to the United Kingdom within the opening weeks.
Cruz has said that before during the campaign. The claim rated two pinocchios from Washington Post fact checkers. UK Prime Minister Cameron and President Obama admiring the remaining bust of Churchill. White House
Obama did send a bust of Churchill back to England. That bust was loaned to George Bush and when he left office the statue had to go back. However, there is another statue which has a permanent place in the White House furnishings. That statue stayed at the White House and in the photo above is being viewed by U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron along with Barack Obama in 2010.
It is a pretty silly controversy, so am I writing about it?
Given Cruz’s close ties to David Barton and Glenn Beck, the fact that Cruz repeats what is to him a useful story despite it being so misleading as to be untrue is relevant to his candidacy. Just yesterday, I posted a clip of David Barton claiming that he was on the FBI’s hate group list. He encouraged his listeners to go look up his name on the FBI website. However, I learned from the FBI that the agency has no formal list of hate groups and so David Barton can’t be on it. Barton has made numerous false claims about historical and current events.
While opening for Cruz’s campaign speeches in Iowa, South Carolina and Nevada, Glenn Beck deceived Cruz audiences about his copy of Don Quixote and George Washington’s diary entry on the day Washington signed the Constitution.
These are needless distortions and falsehoods by two of Cruz’s closest endorsers. Cruz’s distortion of the facts was needless as well. However, it seems that Cruz and company have such a pattern of this that all factual claims need to be checked (see also this example from a Cruz legal brief). Those who have followed Barton and Beck know that truth stretching is part of the operating procedure. Either this has rubbed off on Cruz or birds of a feather have flocked together.
So many red flags go up. Cruz’s slogan is TrusTed. My response is: Why should I?
Awhile ago, Right Wing Watch posted a clip of David Barton telling an audience that he was on the FBI website as a “hate group.” He also said there is a new hate group list out from the FBI and he is on it.
First, I went to the FBI website and used the search engine to look for Barton and/or Wallbuilders. I found nothing.
Curious, I decided to call the press office of the FBI and ask where I could see the new list and if Barton was on it. The representative said there was no list like that so Barton couldn’t be on it. She told me that the Southern Poverty Law Center publishes such a list.
I checked out the SPLC site and found an out of date article about Barton as an extremist but he wasn’t labeled a hate group as far as I could see.
In any case, it is hard to understand how Barton could confuse the FBI with the SPLC.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-3nwoAt3WA[/youtube]
And I don’t believe you can be fined in San Antonio just for saying marriage is between a man and a woman.
And Ted Cruz says Trump voters are “low information.“
A story that has been around awhile (since Barton’s 1989 book Myth of Separation) is his claim that Thomas Jefferson incorporated the Bible and Isaac Watts hymnal into the curriculum of the Washington D.C. schools while Jefferson was president. This claim has been thoroughly debunked before by others, notably Jim Allison and Chris Rodda. While those authors documented well their rebuttal to Barton, I like to consult the primary sources for myself. Here I lay out Barton’s claim followed by the truth.
Listen to Barton on Line of Fire:
Transcript:
When he became president of the United States, the Constitution authorizes that Washington, D.C. be run by the federal government, not by any state. So the schools of Washington, D.C. are under federal control. This is a new city when he moves in, he’s the president, he’s the first president to have a full term in the White House, everything else was in New York and Philadelphia, so he gets a full term, brand new city to him, he is now in charge of Washington, D.C. public schools as well. So he’s on the school board for Washington, D.C. public schools, they have to start the system, he authors the plan of education for Washington, D.C. public schools and he installs two reading texts for Washington, D.C. public schools, one is Isaac Watts hymnal, which is where we get the hymns like Joy to the World, etc., that’s what they learned to read from, and the Bible is the other one, and so Jefferson did that.
Barton refers to this story in The Jefferson Lies:
In 1805 President Jefferson was elected head of the board of trustees for the brand new Washington, DC, public schools. 51 He told the city council that he would “willingly undertake the duties proposed to me – so far as others of paramount obligation will permit my attention to them”; 52 that is, he would do what he could for the city schools with the caveat that his presidential duties came first. Robert Brent therefore served as head of the trustees instead of Jefferson; but as a trustee, Jefferson contributed much to the new school system. In fact, James Ormond Wilson, the first superintendent of the Washington, DC, public school system, affirmed that Jefferson was “the chief author of the first plan of public education adopted for the city of Washington.” 53 When the first report of the Washington public schools was prepared and released to document the progress of students, it announced:
Fifty-five have learned to read in the Old and New Testaments and are all able to spell words of three, four, and five syllables; twenty-six are now learning to read Dr. Watts’ Hymns and spell words of two syllables; ten are learning words of four and five letters. Of fifty-nine out of the whole number admitted [enrolled] that did not know a single letter, twenty can now read the Bible and spell words of three, four, and five syllables; twenty-nine read Dr. Watts’ Hymns and spell words of two syllables; and ten, words of four and five letters. 54
Most can probably visualize the Bible as a text to teach reading, 55 but what of Watt’s Hymns? Isaac Watts was a Christian theologian and hymn writer, penning some of the strongest doctrinal anthems in Christendom, including classics such as “Jesus Shall Reign,” “Joy to the World,” “O God our Help in Ages Past,” “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,” “Am I a Soldier of the Cross,” “At the Cross,” and others. It was this hymnal, along with the Bible, that was used to teach reading to students in the school system whose plan of education was directly attributed to Thomas Jefferson.
Barton, David (2015-12-22). The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson (Kindle Locations 1813-1832). WND Books. Kindle Edition.
Jefferson was elected to the D.C. school board in 1805. He accepted in a letter to Robert Brent and at the time told Brent he would “willingly undertake the duties proposed to me, so far as others of paramount obligation will permit my attention to them.” In other words, being president had to come first. After this, Barton’s claims are mostly false.
Did Jefferson Write the Plan of Education for Washington, D.C. Schools?
Barton says in his book that Jefferson authored the plan of education. However, the source he cited doesn’t say that. About Jefferson’s involvement in the D.C. plan of education, Wilson (Barton’s own source) wrote:
A notably comprehensive report, setting forth in detail the plan of the entire educational system from an academy to a university, was prepared by a select committee and adopted September 19, 1805. Mr Jefferson’s early and liberal contribution in money and his accepting and holding the offices of trustee and president of the board of trustees of public schools so long as he resided here show his personal interest in their establishment, and the fact that he had several years earlier proposed a quite similar plan of education for the state of Virginia and a few years later, in 1817, vigorously renewed his proposal, make a strong probability that he himself was the chief author of the first plan of public education adopted for the city of Washington.
Barton’s quotation of Wilson is where the mischief is. In The Jefferson Lies, Barton wrote:
In fact, James Ormond Wilson, the first superintendent of the Washington, DC, public school system, affirmed that Jefferson was “the chief author of the first plan of public education adopted for the city of Washington.”
But look at what Wilson wrote and notice what Barton omitted in The Jefferson Lies. Wilson said Jefferson’s donations and his prior work on education in Virginia
make a strong probability that he himself was the chief author of the first plan of public education adopted for the city of Washington. (bold print is what Barton left out of his quote)
Wilson did not affirm that Jefferson wrote the plan, he guessed Jefferson authored it based on circumstantial evidence. We don’t know what Jefferson’s role was in writing the plan.
Did Jefferson Make Sure the Bible Was Used in D.C. Schools?
Even if Jefferson did write the plan with his own hand, it destroys Barton’s claim because Jefferson didn’t include Bible in it. Wilson’s history provides a description of the 1805 plan:
In their plan the board of trustees said:
The academy shall consist of as many schools as circumstances may require, to be limited at present to two, one of which shall be situated east of the Capitol and within half a mile of it and the other within half a mile of the President’s house, it being understood that these positions are considered by the board as temporary, and consequently subject at any future time to alteration. In these schools poor children shall be taught reading, writing, grammar, arithmetic, and such branches of the mathematics as may qualify them for the professions they are intended to follow, and they shall receive such other instruction as is given to pay pupils, as the board may from time to time direct, and pay pupils shall, besides, be instructed in geography and in the Latin language. The schools shall be open each day, Sundays excepted, eight hours in summer and six hours in winter, to be distributed throughout the day as shall be fixed by the board, except during vacation, which shall not commence prior to the first of August, nor continue after the 10th of September, and whose duration shall be fixed by the board. (emphasis added)
There is no mention of the Bible or a hymnal by Watts or anyone else.
So where does Barton get the idea that Jefferson incorporated the Bible and Watts’ hymnal?
A little later in his article, Wilson described some developments after Jefferson left office.
In 1812, the Washington schools switched their methods to allow a D.C. school to follow the approach of an educator named Joseph Lancaster. Then in 1813, a report of the progress under the new educational plan was submitted. Wilson provides the entire report; I will cite the part of it misused by Barton:
In 1813 Mr Henry Ould made the first report of a Washington public school of which we have any record.
It reads as follows : February 10, 1813.
This day 12 months ago I had the pleasure of opening under your auspices the second genuine Lancasterian school in America. The system was set in operation (as far as the nature of the room would admit) in this city on the 10th of February, 1812, in an inconvenient house opposite the General Post Office, but notwithstanding the smallness of the school-room there were 120 scholars entered on the list during the first three months. I was then under the necessity of delaying the admission of scholars, as the room would not accommodate more than 80 to 100 scholars. It now becomes my duty to lay before you an account of the improvement of the scholars placed under my direction in your institution, which I shall do in the following order:
OF NUMBERS
130 scholars have been admitted into your institution since the 10th of February, 1812, viz., 82 males and 48 females, out of which number 2 have died and 37 left the school for various employments, after passing through several grades of the school, which therefore leaves 91 on the list.
PROGRESS IN READING AND SPELLING
55 have learned to read in the Old and New Testaments, and are all able to spell words of three, four, and five syllables; 26 are now learning to read Dr Watts’ Hymns and spell words of two syllables; 10 are learning words of four and five letters. Of 59 out of the whole number admitted that did not know a single letter, 20 can now read the Bible and spell words of three, four, and five syllables; 29 read Dr Watts’ Hymns and spell words of two syllables, and 10, words of four and five letters.
Thomas Jefferson left the presidency in 1809 and retired to Monticello, no longer president or a member of the D.C. school board. This 1813 report summarized the work of one school which was implemented in 1812. Barton gets his claim that Jefferson included the Bible and Watts’ hymnal in his plan from a report about another plan implemented in one school and submitted nearly four years after he left town.
Barton’s mash up of the facts is clearly wrong and has been since 1989.
What Did Jefferson Say About the Bible in Schools?
Joseph Lancaster believed in using the Bible as a reading book. Thomas Jefferson on the other hand did not. In Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, he directly addressed the use of the Bible in schools:
The first stage of this education being the schools of the hundreds, wherein the great mass of the people will receive their instruction the principal foundations of future order will be laid here. Instead therefore of putting the Bible and Testament into the hands of the children at an age when their judgments are not sufficiently matured for religious enquiries, their memories may here be stored with the most useful facts from Grecian, Roman, European, and American history. — The first elements of morality too may be instilled into their minds such as when further developed as their judgments advance in strength may teach them how to work out their own greatest happiness by showing them that it does not depend on the condition of life in which chance has placed them but is always the result of a good conscience good health occupation and freedom in all just pursuits. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 154. (emphasis added)
In sum, David Barton claims Thomas Jefferson wrote a plan of education for the Washington, D.C. schools which included instruction in reading from the Bible and a hymn book. The very source Barton cites as evidence debunks these claims and demonstrates that Barton is willing to mash up the facts to get a story useful for his overall narrative about Thomas Jefferson.
and Cruz promote very similar incorrect facts about climate change. Cruz has been known to play a little fast and loose with the facts and he uses Glenn Beck as a surrogate. It is one thing to simply be mistaken, it is another thing when those easily debunked falsehoods make it into policy provisions. Can you imagine a David Barton appointment to a policy making post in a Cruz administration? I can imagine needless fact-free debates over AIDS, PTSD, climate change, crime rates, etc.
