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et’s return now to Larry Schweikart’s 48 Liberal Lies about American History (That You Probably Learned in School), with two more lies from this solid review of what liberal history profs are doing to revise the past and pollute the minds of the next generation.

Lie #11 – No Terrorists or Weapons of Mass Destruction were Hiding in Iraq

A systematic search found no active production facilities or stockpiles for chemical, nuclear, or biological weapons of mass destruction, refuting one of the basic justifications for the war. – David Goldfield et al., The American Journey

Did the failure to find “active” WMD evidence in Iraq really refute one of Bush’s three justifications for the war? Ever heard of a murder conviction that came without a murder weapon or a body? Of course you have, but David Goldfield et al. would rather ignore the complex and hang on the simplistic – as would many of his colleagues.

First, the lib revisionists need to deal with who else was involved in the WMD “deception” – the French, British, Spanish, Australian, Japanese, German, Israeli intelligence services, the Egyptian and Russian presidents, the king of Jordan, and the United Nations Security Council, all of whom stated that Hussein had or was pursuing weapons of mass destruction.

Then, of course, you’d have to overlook his gassing of the Kurds, which led Hans Blix of the UN to state Hussein had 6,500 WMDs. And there were Saddam’s two sons in law, who during their brief defection testified about Iraqi WMD programs. They were executed upon their foolish return to Iraq. (So foolish that I’ll go ahead and accept that their testimony may be discounted since they were obviously idiots.)

Then there’s little niggles like this:

In 2003, a UN weapons inspector confidently stated that Ira had an ongoing nuclear program, and that he knew personally of uranium reporcessing at a facility six miles from Tarmiya. A twenty-gallon barrel found in northern Ira tested positive for Sarin, and another tested positive for mustard gas.

And Goldfield et al. conveniently ignore the tape recordings found of Hussein discussing his WMD program, and the need to hustle the evidence out of Iraq prior to an invasion – and the 56 “sorties” ‘of commercial jetliners, their seats removed, between Iraq and Syria prior to the war.

As for terrorists in Iraq, Schweikart runs through the same sort of sources – our own State Dept., evidence found in Iraq, respected publications like Janes and less respected news sources like CBS, etc. – to prove that Hussein was supporting terrorists in general and al-Qaeda in particular.

There’s plenty more in this chapter; real, hard evidence, as opposed to cute “Bush Lied, People Died” sloganeering.

Lie #12 – The Founders Envisioned a “Wall of Separation” Between Church and State, Keeping Religious Influence out of Government

The Founding Fathers did not intend to establish the United Sttes of America as a Christian nation [and] the assertion that the United States … was founded as a “Christian Nation” is itself a myth. – Mark Weldon “Whitten, The Myth of Christian America

I found myself using my Kindle’s highlighting function multiple times on every page of this chapter because its stuffed full of rebuttal of the vapid claims of the separation of church and state fanatics. If, for example, America’s founding fathers didn’t see America as a Christian nation, how come the colony’s own constitutions saw it as one. Here’s Virginia’s:

We, greatly commending, and graciously accepting of, their Deisres for the Furtherance of so noble a Work … in propagating the Christian Religion to such People [native Americans] as yet live in Darkness and miserable Ignorance of the true knowledge and Worship of God [establish the colony of Virginia.

The Charter of New England (1620) stated that the main objective of the colony was "the enlightenment of the Chrisitan religion, to the Glory of God Almighty."

Why, if America was not a Christian nation, did some colonies have statutes requiring attendance at church? (The sort of thing correctly precluded by a proper interpretation of separation of church and state.)

In 1812, the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment allowed Christianity to "receive encouragement from the state, so far as was not incompatible with the private rights of conscience, and freedom of religious worship." In 1892, SCOTUS found unanimously:

Our laws and institutions necessarily are based upon and embody the teachings of the Redeemer of mankind ... [In] this sense and to this extent our civilization and our institutions are emphatically Christian. … This is a Christian nation.

And it remains one to this day, if you check any national polling or any compilation by government or religious organizations.

The Chapter also delves into Jefferson’s letter, which is the basis of fraudulent interpretations of separation of church and state, effectively dismissing the arguments as misinterpretations or outright frauds.

The Lies They Teach: #9 and #10
The Lies They Teach – #8
The Lies They Teach: #6 And #7
The Lies They Teach: #4 And #5
The Lies They Teach: #1 – #3

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eaven forbid that schools should have a caring environment.

No, scratch that.  Whatever forbid that schools should have a caring environment.  There, that’s suitably secular for this story from the crumbling edges of our civilization.  And the story is just the start of the story; bear with me.

The Freedom from Religion Foundation is bringing a lawsuit against the Cherry Creek schools in Denver because some of the principles taught in the district’s “40 Developmental Assets” program allegedly are drawn from biblical teachings.

For example, Asset 5 in the program, a “caring school climate,” allegedly is related by the institute to the teaching in the New Testament book of Mark, which says, “Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name, welcomes me,” according to a report in the Denver Post.

The program also recommends students spend an hour or more a week in a religious community, and the complaint alleges that is using tax money to promote religion, the report said.

The foundation, based in Madison, Wis., said in an amended complaint in federal court in Denver it has evidence the Cherry Creek program, developed by the Search Institute, is linked to the Bible. (WND)

The Cherry Creek program has been using Search Institute materials for 15 years, not as curricula but “a behavioral framework” promoted by the schools.  Search the Search Institute’s mission page and you have to look very hard to find a reference to religion on it (the word “congregation” appears once), although its history page reveals it started over 50 years ago as a Luthern program.  This is a program that’s sufficiently un-overt to fit in America’s secular classrooms.

Have we come to the point where merely being “linked to the Bible” is enough to trash something?  Are we now at the place where the suspicion that Search Institute’s core beliefs are Judeo-Christian, even if there aren’t Bible verses all over their stuff,  alone is sufficient to fire up the book-burning machine?

America just happens to be “linked to the Bible” (here, for example), so what are we supposed to do to please/appease the tiny number of crackpots at the Freedom from Religion Foundation, aka the Whining Shrilly That Most People Don’t Believe What I Believe Foundation?  Toss in the towel and become secular fodder for Islamists, like Europe?

Well, before we accept that end, perhaps it’s worthwhile to scan down to the bottom of this article and see what’s going on in schools in the vicinity, since WND’s Web site happily puts together links to related stories; in this case, stories on education:

Teacher falsely tells kids they have fatal disease

Campaign launched to liberate ‘speling’

Student says ‘F— off!’ on test, gets better grade

Today’s class: Hating Jews 101

Bilingual, pro-American book ‘unfit’ for L.A. schools

Female teacher arrest for 9 flings with student

6th-grade survey: Classmate most likely to get pregnant

3rd-graders asked to help classmate in gender change

Children’s hospital launches sex change for kids program

Voting rights challenged in ‘coed showers’ lawsuit

Lord help us!  If we want more of these kinds of terrible goings-on where we educate our precious children, then yes, let’s continue un-linking America from the Bible!

hat-tip: Jim

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just received this email:

The Exchange Club of Irvine, Irvine Chamber of Commerce and City of Irvine are pleased to announce that the 27^th Annual Thanksgiving Community Prayer Breakfast has been set for Tuesday, November 25, 2008.

This year, we are excited to feature nationally-recognized legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky as our keynote speaker. As the newly named Dean of UCI Law, Dean Chemerinsky will help us celebrate our community with this important breakfast.

For those of you who don’t listen to the Hugh Hewitt show or otherwise are unfamiliar with Chemerinsky, he routinely stakes out the Left’s limits of the law – including being a separation of church and state hawk, as evidenced by this WaPo op/ed he authored:

With little public attention or even notice, the House of Representatives has passed a bill that undermines enforcement of the First Amendment’s separation of church and state. The Public Expression of Religion Act – H.R. 2679 – provides that attorneys who successfully challenge government actions as violating the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment shall not be entitled to recover attorneys fees. The bill has only one purpose: to prevent suits challenging unconstitutional government actions advancing religion. …

Such a bill could have only one motive: to protect unconstitutional government actions advancing religion. The religious right, which has been trying for years to use government to advance their religious views, wants to reduce the likelihood that their efforts will be declared unconstitutional.

Granted, it’s possible to believe religion has no place whatsoever in the public square and still be religious. But it’s rare. I would love to attend a prayer breakfast featuring an attorney like Jay Sekulow, who stands up for religion’s right to exist broadly and robustly in American society, but Chemerinsky? I think it might be better to pray for him than with him.

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o Sunday Scan this week – more on that in my next post – but before getting to that, I had to share with you a bit of what those who hold the radical view that there should be no religion in politics said about yesterday’s McCain/Obama Saddleback Forum.

There are zillions of examples because the blogosphere skews left, but I chose as my one Salon editor in chief Joan Walsh’s Are We Now Officially a Christian Nation? Walsh does not feel Obama should have attended the forum at all:

I’m not sure why Obama voluntarily sat down for a nationally televised conversation about his private religious faith with a relatively conservative Christian leader, as though that’s a reasonable station of the cross, so to speak, for a major American presidential candidate.

If we take the incredulous question of her column’s title at face value – that America is not a Christian nation “officially” – perhaps Walsh has a point. If we must “officially” be a Christian nation in order to talk about faith, then we have a problem because we have no official religion. However, we are undeniably a nation made up overwhelmingly of Christians, not an official Christian nation, a truth the secularists try hard to avoid.

Their decades-long effort to reinterpret “separation of church and state” has made normal conversations and exhibits of faith a social faux pas, necessitating the need for things like the Saddleback Forum, which will help to nudge the pendulum back to a more natural state.

What’s strange about Walsh’s column, and the Left’s take on the Forum generally, is how off the perception is:

And while “Pastor Rick” went out of his way to say Obama and McCain were his personal friends, I personally perceived Warren as mildly pro-McCain. I thought Warren hurried Obama through his answers. Maybe not intentionally. He sat there and went “um-hm” and “hmmm” and “OK” and “yeah” literally every few seconds throughout a lot of Obama’s early answers — maybe trying to be fair, to show empathy; maybe because he himself wasn’t quite comfortable. Either way, it had the effect of feeling as if he was rushing Obama.

Obama was rushed? His rambling answers in search of a position went so long that McCain actually had the chance to answer two questions Pastor Rick Warren didn’t have time to ask Obama. If Warren had rushed Obama, he might have had the chance to answer these questions.

On the other hand, Warren didn’t have time for a “hmmm” or “um-hm” while McCain shotgunned his direct answers.

For all her odd perspective, Walsh got two things right:

While I appreciated Obama declaring himself pro-choice before this crowd, I thought by far his worst answer was on the question of when life begins, when he replied: “Answering that question is above my pay grade.” That quip could haunt him; nothing is above the president’s pay grade.

She got that right. Google coughed up 242,000 hits this morning for “Obama above my pay grade.”

The other thing she got right?

Still, I’d call McCain the winner tonight. He used the forum to punch home his message, while Obama delivered a soft getting-to-know-you pitch.

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