The Right's Favorite Historian: Founding Fathers Opposed Darwin

snip

He's a pretty influential guy. So what, exactly, does he teach? On Wednesday, Right Wing Watch flagged a recent interview Barton gave with an evangelcial talk show, in which he argues that the Founding Fathers had explicitly rejected Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Yes, that Darwin. The one whose seminal work, On the Origin of Species, wasn't even published until 1859. Barton declared, "As far as the Founding Fathers were concerned, they'd already had the entire debate over creation and evolution, and you get Thomas Paine, who is the least religious Founding Father, saying you've got to teach Creation science in the classroom. Scientific method demands that!" Paine died in 1809, the same year Darwin was born.


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That's where we are headed. Sigh.

it is my opinion that our Founding Fathers, (as learned and wise and activist as they were) left us with an ideal that was never actually a solid and real reality in this country, ever.

Sure, we can all dote over them and say that they were creating something new and liberating while we pour over their ideas, philosophies and political ideologies, but, to this day, they remain as wonderful concepts in the delivery with very little in the way of actual results. We can choose to live solely in an world of glorified abstractions, (all we want to) or we can, at the very least, dare to compare them, diligently with the actualities and results that ensued over the course of our history.

Certainly, we can condone the ideas as guiding lights, but from the start, we can see glaring inconsistencies between the alluring siren of their ideals and the practical aspects of the time they were introduced that were, often, in contrast.

So, we could call that the gestation of an ideal that was before its time. Perhaps the hope was that it would eventually give birth, mature and grow until it become the reality of our country.

What we are living today is not the death of the fulfillment of what our Forefathers presented, fought for, and enacted, but the total demise of an idea that never came to its fruition, except for in the minds of its people who thought, at various stages, that they were living what the Constitution presented and the Bill of Rights supported.

That is now a dream and a fiction for historians to figure out. Meanwhile, we get to live in a delay-loop where we think things are as they should have been and most of us are so confused that the difference is not clear ... yet.

and Lenin

at the Palin, Bachmann, Barton School of Lower Learning
$10,000 for a four week course and you can feel like you
could run a country. Know more than anyone else without having to prove it.
Graduation guaranteed.

Condemned Darwin.