Today's right wing pernicious lie of the day: The United States Constitution was based on Bible verses, proving the founders intended for the United States to be a Christian nation. If you watch Rick Green -- wingers' self-appointed "Constitution Coach" -- he spews out a lot of nonsense about this and that verse in the Bible, all of which are out of the Old Testament and more fundamentally, out of the books which comprised the Torah before some Christians decided they should also be incorporated as part of the ancient texts comprising today's Bible.
He talks real fast so we don't really have time to slow it down and look at what he's saying for a reason: If we did, everyone would call bullshit on him.
He cites, for example, Leviticus 19:34, which, with 19:33, commands the following: "When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God."
He claims this passage supports "Uniform immigration," but in fact, the Constitution is silent on immigration, instead addressing the naturalization process. And let's just be real here. No one thinks wingers give one spare thought to the stranger among them, choosing instead to entrap them in barbed wire, so children can drown and women can miscarry while being entangled in the wire. Yes, do tell me more about the Christian principles behind those acts.
Green cites Deuteronomy 17:15 as the basis for the "natural-born" president clause which says in partnership with the preceding verse, "When you come to the land that the Lord your God is giving you, and you possess it and dwell in it and then say, 'I will set a king over me, like all the nations that are around me,' you may indeed set a king over you whom the Lord Your God will choose. One from among your brothers you shall set as king over you." This whole command was to the Israelites, who were considered set apart from the other nations at the time. It wasn't the king part that was bad. It was that the king had to be an Israelite. But again, if you listen to Green he just steamrolls right over that fact and lies about how we don't want a king, we want a president.
These are just two examples, but they're representative of all the citations Green makes in that video.
Why am I taking so much time on this? Because Prager University is now part of Florida's curriculum, and the same nonsense is going to be taught to children in schools in Florida, which is terrible and driving teachers crazy. Here's a video from Florida's Education Association debunking and pushing back on this dreadful development.
I grew up in the 60s and 70s, when history books were whitewashed and watered down with respect to how we treated Native Americans, what slavery meant during the Civil War, and more. The idea of our kids returning to that state of ignorance is repugnant to me. Teach the truth, not some bullshit version where all the founding fathers were saints in white leather leaping and praising God while they wrote the Constitution.
And if anyone deserves the credit for the practical law in the Constitution, it's the Jews, who preserved and passed down Talmudic law through the ages. Not Christians.
[h/t RightWingWatch]
