On the Bryan Fischer Show Tuesday, and then yesterday via Twitter, David Barton spoke favorably of Scott Lively’s article defending Barton, posted earlier this week. The chief aim of the article is to link my criticisms of Scott Lively’s book The Pink Swastika with our fact checking of claims made by David Barton about Thomas Jefferson in The Jefferson Lies.
The mention of Lively comes at about 5 minutes into the clip I posted on Monday. Then today, Barton tweeted the article to his followers. As regular readers of this blog know, Lively promotes criminalization of homosexuality and has done so in nations around the world. He most associated with the efforts in Uganda to maintain laws against homosexuality there.
In the summer of 2009, I looked into his book The Pink Swastika. Lively claims that the Holocaust was animated by gay Nazis. Although I trust my way around books of history, I also like to get advice from historians. For that reason, I asked then GCC colleague and historian J.D. Wyneken to look at the Pink Swastika and tell me what he thought about it. Wyneken delivered a stunning blow to The Pink Swastika in a two-part post on my blog (read them here: one, two). You can read the rest of the series with my posts included here.
There are many problems with Lively’s current analysis. The most important is that he is wrong on his assumptions. Michael Coulter and I wrote Getting Jefferson Right because we believed it is important for Christians to discuss issues of church, state and liberty from a foundation of fact within proper context. We are both interested in the topic and wanted to do it.
Another problem which is what I want to correct now is Lively’s revision of recent history and the false picture he paints regarding my colleague and friend J. D. Wyneken. In his conspiracy theory piece, Lively says:
He [Throckmorton] even corralled a newly-arrived faculty member at Grove City to write a criticism of my book The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party. I called the man who wrote the critique, intending to challenge him to a debate. He told me that he had been very uncomfortable with Throckmorton’s request and didn’t intend to repeat the collaboration.
Yesterday, I talked to J.D. Wyneken who disputed Lively’s account. Lively may have called but according to Wyneken, they never spoke on the phone. Lively emailed and, according to Wyneken, wanted to drive a wedge between us. Wyneken never said he was uncomfortable with my request to look at Lively’s book, but rather was glad to provide a reaction to it. Wyneken planned no additional posts since his interest in the matter was complete, not because he had second thoughts about what he said about The Pink Swastika. There was and is no problem with Wyneken. That was a figment of Lively’s imagination.
So now we have David Barton distributing an article which traffics in assumptions and false statements about me and my friends. Rather than paint me as a bogeyman, wouldn’t it be more respectable to just address the issues which have been raised by no fewer than 15 conservative Christian scholars?