As I’ve mentioned several times, the easiest way to prove the religious right is lying when it claims it’s just standing up for the rights of Bible-believing Americans is to watch what they say in unguarded moments. Well, People for the American Way’s Right Wing Watch found a lulu of an example from this weekend. David Barton, the religious right’s favorite pseudo-historian, declared that we will never find a vaccine for AIDS. Why? The Bible supposedly teaches that God will never such a vaccine to be discovered.
Warren Throckmorton, a psychology professor at Grove City College, an evangelical college roughly halfway between Pittsburgh and Erie, noticed that Barton spoke this past Saturday at Faith Baptist Church in Knightdale, North Carolina; a suburb of Raleigh. Right Wing Watch got a clip.
During his talk, Barton delved into something he’s been pushing for at least three years–that there will never be a cure for AIDS because it’s the divine punishment for homosexuality delineated in Romans 1:27. Barton told his audience that verse calls for gays to get “in their bodies the penalty due them.” He claimed that it’s no accident that HIV is “the fastest transmuting virus in the history of mankind”–so fast that every time it appears a vaccine has been nailed down, HIV “reshuffles,” and it’s discovered the vaccine doesn’t work.
As proof, Barton cited a 2009 article in Popular Science touting the success of a prototype HIV vaccine in a clinical trial. Then he showed an article from Yahoo News that came out “six weeks later” saying the vaccine hadn’t worked after all. There’s just one problem–the articles refer to two completely different trials. Throckmorton discovered that the talk Barton gave this weekend is essentially the same one he gave last month at Charis Bible College, a charismatic Bible college in Colorado Springs. The first article Barton cited in both talks refers to the RV 144 trials, a series of vaccine trials that had begun in Thailand in 2003. However, the second article Barton cited was actually written in 2013–and refers to the end of an entirely different set of trials, the HTVN 505 trials. The failure of the HTVN 505 trial had absolutely nothing to do with the success of the RV 144 trial. But as we all know, such little things as facts are never important to a religious right speaker.
The most benign interpretation of this is that Barton was counting on his audience not to dig further. Sadly, this is very plausible. You have to remember that most fundies live in a bubble where Barton’s two-decade effort to “prove” that this country was founded by Christians and should be governed by Christians is accepted more or less without question. In this world, Barton’s daily radio program, “Wallbuilders Live,” is considered a news source.
Want to know something really frightening? Barton could have potentially been in the United States Senate rather than at that church this weekend. Back in 2013, a group of Texas tea partiers tried to persuade Barton to challenge John Cornyn in the 2014 Republican primary. However, hopes of elephant-on-elephant violence were dashed a few days later, when Barton told Glenn Beck he wasn’t running. As we all know, the Texas Republican primary base is as hard-right as anywhere–meaning that Barton could have actually won the nomination. And given that the Democrats only put up a few warm bodies in their Senate primary, Barton could have won the general as well. Which means that Texas averted being represented by two promoters of pseudoscience in the Senate.
Throckmorton first came to national attention in 2012, when he helped expose Barton’s just-published book, “The Jefferson Lies”–an attempt to prove that Thomas Jefferson was really a born-again Christian–as a steaming pile of distortions and outright fabrications. The errors Throckmorton and others pointed out were so egregious that even though “The Jefferson Lies” was a New York Times bestseller (a figure likely inflated by brisk Bible Belt sales), publisher Thomas Nelson had no choice but to pull it from print. Granted, most of us in the reality-based world knew Barton was a quack. However, that criticism was mostly blown off because it came mostly from secularists at first. And they say that Christians are the ones being persecuted?
One can hope that Throckmorton’s latest effort to turn the hot lights on Barton’s hokum bears similar fruit. But to help things along, I emailed Faith Baptist’s pastor, Mick Bowen, with a link to Throckmorton’s research. Let’s hope Bowen has the integrity to disavow Barton.
