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A few nights ago, Bill O’Reilly declared victory in the War on Christmas, only to gird himself for the War on Easter. He and Laura Ingraham lamented the coming of “spring egg hunts” and the banishing of the Easter Bunny as “a new era of persecution that we have never seen in this country before toward traditional faiths.” This morning, Fox & Friends joined the crusade as Professor (and right-wing extremist) Carol Swain sent out a call for the Fox faithful to “stand up against political correctness.”

“I can tell you that if we remove the name “Easter,” then we might as well call them ‘pagan egg hunts,’" Swain said. Predictably, she also saw this as “part of a larger effort across the country” to attack Christianity.

The host for this segment was none other than O’Reilly’s stalker/ambush producer Jesse Watters. The guest-host spot was his reward, apparently, for harassing people like President Obama’s uncle and liberal blogger/journalist Amanda Terkel on camera.

Watters asked, “What effect do you think this has on children growing up? Are they gonna grow older and realize this was all nonsense? Or do you think this is going to stick with them and they’re gonna pass this kind of stuff on to their kids?”

Swain replied:

It all depends on what the Christians in America do. The last survey that I saw, 78% of Americans profess to be Christians. If they are Christians, they should not be participating in pagan egg hunts. If Easter is removed from the egg hunts, then it’s a meaningless pagan holiday. And they need to sit down and have a heart-to-heart with their children. And they need to begin to speak up. We, the people, need to speak up and fight for our traditions and values. We need to organize, use social media and boycott.

That's right, America. Boycott any and all "spring egg hunts" because it's the Christian thing to do.

David Barton tells Kirk Cameron about how the Founding Fathers wanted bibles in schools

Fake historian David Barton got a bit of what’s been coming to him on Wednesday, when NPR’s “All Things Considered” turned its polite, soft-spoken, but firmly fact-based attention to the evangelical demagogue beloved of Glenn Beck and former child star Kirk Cameron.

In a segment titled “The Most Influential Evangelical You’ve Never Heard Of,” Barbara Bradley Hagerty, NPR’s religion correspondent, introduced the “Prairie Home Companion” and “Car Talk” crowd to Barton, a self-promoting windbag who specializes in claiming that things he disagrees with are unbiblical. His special obsession is the Founding Fathers, who, he says, were devout Christians who never envisioned anything like a separation of church and state.

Hagerty blogged the segment on NPR’s website. (C&L has bolded the especially good parts for your reading ease):

“You look at Article 3, Section 1, the treason clause,” [Barton] told James Robison on Trinity Broadcast Network. “Direct quote out of the Bible. You look at Article 2, the quote on the president has to be a native born? That is Deuteronomy 17:15, verbatim. I mean, it drives the secularists nuts because the Bible's all over it! Now we as Christians don't tend to recognize that. We think it's a secular document; we've bought into their lies. It's not.”

We looked up every citation Barton said was from the Bible, but not one of them checked out. Moreover, the Constitution as written in 1787 has no mention of God or religion except to prohibit a religious test for office. The First Amendment does address religion.

She continued,

[H]istorians say Barton is flat-out wrong in his facts and conclusion.

And,

David Barton is not a historian. He has a bachelor's degree in Christian education from Oral Roberts University and runs a company called WallBuilders in Aledo, Texas. But his vision of a religion-infused America is wildly popular with churches, schools and the GOP, and that makes him a power. He was named one of Time magazine's most influential evangelicals. He was a long-time vice chairman for the Texas Republican Party. He says that he consults for the federal government and state school boards, that he testifies in court as an expert witness, that he gives a breathtaking 400 speeches a year.

As I said, self-promoting windbag.

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