Fail Quote: US Founding Fathers opposed teaching Evolution

From Christian Dominionist and pseudo-historian David Barton, sending the largest nail yet through his own credibility by actually claiming that the US Founding Fathers had “already had the entire debate on Creation/Evolution” and endorsed teaching Creationism in public science classrooms:

My transcript:

Everybody thinks that’s a new debate in the ’60s – ’cause that’s when the court ruled on it, ’68 – well, you go back to Darwin, that’s not a new debate, because you go back to Founding Fathers; as far as they were concerned, they’d already had the entire debate on Creation/Evolution; and you get Thomas Paine, who’s the least religious Founding Father, saying, “You’ve got to teach Creation Science in public school classroom. Scientific method demands that!” Now, we’re opposite today.

I know it’s par for the course for conservatives to hold the Founding Fathers in an almost fetishistic form of idolatry, but Barton is taking it one step further in apparently believing they actually had the ability to travel through time and debate whether to teach Evolution or Creationism nearly a century before Charles Darwin even published On the Origin of Species, the first work to bring Evolutionary Theory to light, in 1859.

And yet, this is the man who’s gaining momentum amongst the US religious-Right as a supposedly credible expert in history. The mind boggles.

(via Right Wing Watch)

Tags: David Barton • US Founding Fathers • Christian Dominionism