I was on a message board Saturday discussing the rallies in Washington. One woman on the board went so far as to describe Glenn Beck as a "beacon of light". Needless to say, that started quite a stir. When asked why she kept saying things like he gave her information that she couldn't get elsewhere, he was truthful, and honest, she said that she doubted any liberals bothered to even watch him before criticizing him.
I responded that admittedly I hadn't watched him since he left ABC's
Good Morning America to host his own show on Fox News, so she challenged me to watch his show and see what I thought of him then. So I did.
I recorded it Saturday night, then sat down with pen and paper Sunday to watch it. These are the observations I made.
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The program last night had a group of students that he more or less quizzed on their understanding of government politics and the Constitution.
According to Beck and his guest, David Barton, the philosophical point of our government are in the first 123 words of the Declaration of Independence.
"When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends,..."
The philosophies are as follows:
1) There is a Creator
2) He gives inalienable rights
3) He has moral laws that governs men
4) The government exists to protect the rights He has given
5) Below God given rights, government rule by the consent of the governed.
Now for just a brief moment, let's disregard any atheists then or now. There is no dispute that the majority of the founding fathers believed in A god.
Beck and Barton referenced the mentioning of God and Creator in the document, but they left out a key word, one that the Founding Fathers found fit to also capitalize,.Nature's God.
Several of them WERE deist. That doesn't mean they were atheist (don't believe in gods) or agnostic (unsure, wait and see). They believed in God/god, and possibly in some cases, Jesus. What they didn't believe in was organized religion. That is what a deist is.
So this is why Thomas Jefferson, the same man that studied the Qur'an and wrote his own version of the Bible, and might have signed off on many letters with "In Christ's Name". However, when I did a search of the letters mentioned by Barton and Beck on the show where he signed them "In Christ", I couldn't find any mention of them anywhere other than Beck's and Barton's sites. Even searching the LOC and various museum records I've found nothing. I'll continue to look for them, but at this point I can't find evidence of their existence.
Barton does have an image of a document that has Jefferson's name on it that has the date as "in the year of our Lord Christ", however it is typed. The fact that the year portion is typed removes it from his design, but also shines an odd light on it since every document I've found of Jefferson's has been written long hand.
The "laws of nature and Nature's God" leaves it open to interpretation by any belief system. And that was the intent.
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Glenn Beck did make the most common mistake about the First Amendment. "Congress shall make no law RESPECTING an establishment of religion". That does not mean that we won't become a theocracy (although it is automatically included) it means no laws will be made respecting the preferences of a religion.
The First Amendment protects the citizens from having their beliefs infringed upon, from having a faith forced upon them, from the government becoming a theocracy of any type, and from having laws created that are solely based on religious belief.
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They said that the collapse of the USSR (Russia is still a country) was caused by communism, because it's just a bad system. That isn't true in the least. The USSR collapsed because the Arms Race bankrupt the nation. Simply put, we out-spent them.
No economic system is "bad", but pure economic systems are easier to corrupt. And that was the case in the USSR. Our economic system is a blend between socialist and free market systems, and for the most part it works.
They said that "the left" wants a Marxist state, which is blatantly false. Anyone I've ever spoken to, any policy circulating through Washington, promotes a WELL REGULATED free market system. Witout the regulations a free market system can be corrupt into a caste system. That is what happens when "the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer".
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"In God We Trust" was NOT added to our money because of the first 123 words of the Declaration of Independence. It was done for political reasons. During the Civil War it was added to Union money as subtle reminder that the Union considered itself on God's side with respect to slavery.
It was added to the rest of our currency to promote patriotism by drawing attention to the religious differences between America and the USSR during the cold war in the 50's.
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I could not find the quote Beck and David Barton ascribed to Woodrow Wilson that went,
"Forget the Declaration of Independence, it's an old list of grievances."
I couldn't find anything remotely similar, however I did find the following quote:
"What we seek is the reign of law, based upon the consent of the governed and sustained by the organized opinion of mankind."
Woodrow Wilson
Which is in line with what the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution do say.
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They made the claim that the Founding Fathers thought that immigration was a state issue, yet in 1790 they passed a bill to establish an uniform rule of naturalization. UNIFORM RULE, they wanted the same rule to apply in every state. A federal rule.
Frankly, that one wasn't that hard to find, it's listed in the Library of Congress.
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They even addressed something as mundane as George Washington's membership in the Freemasons, stating that it was a minor part of his life, he never took the oaths because they didn't do them at that time, and that he wasn't in full Masonic attire when laying the cornerstone of the Capitol Building. Yet it's all documented in the logs in Fredricksburg. And beyond Beck's site, I can find no reference where Washington every said that Masonry was a small influence in his life.
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As amicable and easy to listen to as he was, my research could not confirm anything he and David Barton said on Saturday night's show, but I did find a lot to refute it. Whether it was intentional misinformation, lack of research, or what, he didn't impart any reliable information in that particular program.
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