Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Profile of WallBuilders Head Who Is On Texas Education Review Panel

AlterNet yesterday carried a long profile of WallBuilders founder David Barton, who in June was appointed a member of a Texas State Board of Education Panel charged with reviewing the state's social studies curriculum. (See prior posting.) Here are some excerpts from the AlterNet piece:
From his base in Aledo, a town of about 2,000 just west of Fort Worth, Barton runs an outfit called WallBuilders that issues a steady stream of books, videos, DVDs, pamphlets and other materials designed to "prove" that the United States was founded to be a Christian nation. Barton argues that American law should be based on the Bible (or, more accurately, his fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible) and says church-state separation was never intended by our Founders....

Despite his thin academic credentials, Barton has managed to become a celebrity in the world of the Religious Right based on his research allegedly "proving" America’s Christian character.... Barton gives hundreds of lectures every year, rallying fundamentalist shock troops to oppose secular government and church-state separation.