| 'Countdown with Keith Olbermann' for Wednesday, February 10th - msnbc tv - Countdown with Keith Olbermann - msnbc.com | The Myth of "Separation of Church and State" |
| OLBERMANN: What happens if you want your audience to believe that the founding fathers did not want separation of church and state, when they obviously, clearly and repeatedly did? | The real meaning of "separation of church and state" is "separation of God and Government." Not a single person who signed the Constitution wanted government to ignore God and His Commandments. |
| Well, you make up quotes defending your position and dishonestly attribute them to the likes of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. Glenn Beck, who sees President Obama as a socialist, Marxist, communist, something-ist, is himself about to unveil his 100-year plan, saying, quote, “we need to start thinking like the Chinese.” | Name one quote that Barton made up.
It's a simple question. Name one quote that Barton made up. |
| Mr. Beck is about to launch something he calls “American Revival.” The announcement for the first event in Orlando next month, breathlessly touting, quote, “the eight-hour event, you and I on stage with three different experts. David Barton is going to be the first one. We‘re going to talk about the meaning of faith in America. You‘ll be stunned when you learn and see the real history that is no longer taught.” | |
| More on Mr. Barton and those quotes in a moment. But this series of meetings, as noted by Will Bunch of the “Philadelphia Daily News,” will lead to a rally on the Lincoln Memorial on August 28th, which is the 47th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King‘s “I Have a Dream” speech. | |
| But what Beck has is a plan, possibly in conjunction with his next book. As he noted last year, quoting, “we need to start thinking like the Chinese. I‘m developing a 100-year plan for America, a 100 year plan. We will plant this idea and it will sprout roots.” | |
| Now back to the kick-off speaker, Dr. Barton. He is the founder of a group called Wall Builders, and he published a book called “The Myth of Separation,” a book so full of phony information about our founding fathers, including fake quotes, that it was rewritten and reissued under a new name, according to Will Bunch. But the basic premise is that we have misinterpreted the founding fathers. For example, Thomas Jefferson viewed the separation of church and state as one-directional, meaning to protect religion from government, but not to protect government from being co-mingled with religion. | |
| That is, of course, completely untrue. Let‘s turn to the senior policy analyst at Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Rob Boston. Thanks if your time tonight, sir. | |
| ROB BOSTON, AMERICANS UNITED FOR SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE: Thanks for having me on. | |
| OLBERMANN: We sort of glanced over this person that Beck will be featuring, David Barton. Can you tell us more about him, and this group of his, the Wall Builders? | Any person who is both ethical and intelligent and wants his opinion on this issue propagated across the internet should read Barton's side:
WallBuilders - Issues and Articles - Unconfirmed Quotations Everything that Boston and Olbermann say are preaching to a very ignorant secularist choir. |
| BOSTON: The best way to describe David Barton is to say that he is to history what the creationists are to science. Against all available evidence, Barton argues that the United States was founded by the framers to be a Christian nation. Now, of course, they forgot to mention that in the Constitution. But that‘s just an inconvenient detail. And he‘s made quite a handy living with his group, Wall Builders, promoting this idea of his, through books, DVD‘s, videos, speaking presentations, this sort of thing. | |
| OLBERMANN: There‘s this quote that he‘s supposedly responsible for promulgating from Madison that supports his argument. And it turns out this is where some sort of insurance company, 1950s handout calendar. Is that the supposed source of the quote? | No. |
| BOSTON: Nobody‘s really certain what the origin of this mysterious quote is. But it‘s a quote of James Madison lauding the Christian principles of the American government. And anybody who has read even a little bit of James Madison would know that that just does not reflect his point of view. A number of us spent a lot of time trying to track down the quote and figure out where it actually came from, but it‘s completely fabricated. Madison never said anything like that. | Madison did say many things like that. See the examples in Barton's article. See more analysis of Madison's position. See Madison's Presidential proclamations. Madison said that truly American legislators should only vote for bills which have a tendency to spread the Gospel around the world. |
| OLBERMANN: And speaking of beliefs, Mr. Barton has previously, in his career, addressed gatherings of so-called Christian groups that have this unfortunate racist bent to them? | |
| BOSTON: Yes, back in the early ‘90s, he did give two speeches to organizations that are so out there that they make Pat Robinson sane. This, of course, was in the pre-Internet days. But you would think, even back then, you could look at the fliers and literature that these groups were producing, and realize that they were both anti-semitic and racist, which they were. | Not only would I speak to a group of racists, I would even speak to a group of atheists. |
| OLBERMANN: Mr. Beck claims that about 100 years ago, the progressive movement designed a plan to create a socialist utopia. This is according to his view of the world as the anti-Christ was Woodrow Wilson. Thus, he has to have a 100-year corrective plan, which he has cleverly called the plan. On his website, his efforts, let me quote this, “culminate in ‘The Plan,‘ a book that will provide specific policies, principles and, most importantly, action steps that each of us can take to play a role in this re-founding.” So do we have a sense from this what he thinks he‘s doing, but what the people who are drawn to this idea, what they may think he‘s doing? | |
| BOSTON: One thing I‘ve noticed from tracking the religious right for 23 years is that when they don‘t like the facts, they just invent new facts. It‘s kind of like fake butter, sometimes they can be just as good as the actual facts to a lot of people. So they promote these crazy facts and they promote this perspective. And this is exactly what‘s going on, this idea that somehow, this grand and glorious Christian legacy of this nation was stolen away from us, and now it‘s being suppressed by the evil liberals. And of course, the universities are in on this, the colleges, the media. Everybody‘s in on this conspiracy. And people like Beck and people like Barton and people like all these TV preachers and so on, they‘re going to get the real truth and the real facts out to the American people. And of course, since the actual history doesn‘t support their point of view, they just invented a new history, just like the creationists invented a new “science.” | |
| OLBERMANN: Obviously, from the far right, and particularly in the last couple of years, we‘ve seen these extraordinary whoppers, to call them kindly, the Birther movement and the distortion of what the Tenth Amendment meant. Do you find this particular thing, this idea of let‘s flip this on its head—it‘s not separation of church and state, but the state necessarily building a wall to protect the church, particularly troubling? | |
| BOSTON: I do find it that way. And one of the reasons is that, right now, as we‘re speaking, there are people all over the world just being oppressed because of what they believe or don‘t believe about God, who would love to have an official separation of church and state. I mean, to me, separation of church and state is one of the great success stories of this nation. It‘s given us more religious freedom than probably any people in history, incredible religious diversity, a pretty good degree of inter-faith peace, if you think about it. And there are people out there saying that that‘s a bad idea, That we should do away with that, that it‘s a-historical? It boggles the mind. | Not a single person who signed the Constitution would agree that it is a good thing for the Federal Government to order local schools to remove copies of the Ten Commandments from all classroom walls. |
| OLBERMANN: How do you feel about this Virginia legislature move? It‘s off-point a little bit, about the microchips today, that they‘re keeping the microchips from being implanted in people because it could be the mark of the anti-Christ? | |
| BOSTON: When I was a kid, I remember reading about that, and there were claims made that actually it was going to be a bar code. They were going to put the bar code on your hand or on your forehead, and you would go to the supermarket and get scanned. And naturally, any time the government wanted to monitor you, they would just use the bar code. Now that was before we had chips. So you see the sort of paranoid strain of thinking among these folks just—it advances to meet the new technology that we have. | |
| OLBERMANN: Besides which, that‘s called the iPhone, and they figured out how to charge us for it. Rob Boston of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, thank you, sir. | |
| BOSTON: Thank you. | |
| OLBERMANN: That‘s COUNTDOWN for this the 2,477th day since the previous president declared mission accomplished in Iraq. I‘m—yes— |