Can Dobson Out-Fruitcake Obama on the Constitution?
A few years ago, Dobson was a fervent support of Roy Moore, who was ousted from his position of chief judge of the Alabama Supreme Court for defying a federal court order to remove the religious monument to the ten commandments he had installed in state courthouse. I wrote about this in an op-ed in The Christian Science Monitor at the time: At a rally on the courthouse steps, James Dobson said:
"I checked yesterday with my research team," Dr. Dobson announced. "There are only two references to religion in the Constitution." The first, from the preamble, he said, refers to securing "the blessings of liberty," which, he asserted, "came from God" (although there is nothing in the document to support that view.) The other was the First Amendment's establishment clause that, he said, "has given such occasion for mischief by the Supreme Court." In a November 2006 interview with Larry King, Dobson indulged in some well debunked revisionist history. I wrote about this at the time. Dobson claimed that there is no such thing as separation of church and state. The historical record clearly shows that while it is true that the phrase separation of church and state is not found in the constitution or the first Amendment, the phrase was in wide use among leading thinkers at the time, and that Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists was an effort by Jefferson to explain his understanding of the meaning of the First Amendment. That is part of the reason why the Supreme Court has used the phrase since at least 1878 to explain the meaning of the First Amendment, and why it has become a standard part of our understanding of the meaning of the Constitution.
KING: But we have a separation of church and state.
If King did his homework, he would find whatever any honest researcher finds in response such claims about church state separation. Last year I published a long essay in The Public Eye magazine, titled History is Powerful: Why the Christian Right Distorts History and Why it Matters, and in it, I quoted a classic scholarly debunking by Brent Walker of Dobson's claim, as articulated by Christian historical revisionist, David Barton:
Dobson and Obama can disagree all they want about the proper interpretation of the Bible. But Barack Obama taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago for twelve years, while James Dobson has a long record of issuing utterly spurious declarations about the constitution with complete conviction.
Can Dobson Out-Fruitcake Obama on the Constitution? | 6 comments (6 topical, 0 hidden)
Can Dobson Out-Fruitcake Obama on the Constitution? | 6 comments (6 topical, 0 hidden)
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