Please click through to the article to get the hotlinks to sources of the info cited in this article. Am too lazy to copy them all over here sorry!
According to a July 20th story from Politico.com, Virginia Congressman James "Randy" Forbes (R-VA) attends Bible study groups at the C Street House. But Forbes is less preoccupied with extramarital sex, it would so far seem, than with a crusade to turn America into a "Christian nation" by overwriting and falsifying the US historical record.
While high-profile mass media journalists such as MSNBC's Rachel Maddow have recently begun giving The Family, the C Street House, and Jeff Sharlet's research some long overdue scrutiny, another aspect of The Family's activities has been almost entirely overlooked; its promotion of fake American history, falsified to justify claims that the United States was originally founded as a Christian nation.
Symbolic of that is a fabricated George Washington quote, known as "Washington's Prayer", that for decades has been incorporated into the program of the National Prayer Breakfast, an event held by The Family every year since President Dwight D. Eisenhower attended the first National Prayer Breakfast event in 1953.
On December 8, 2007, Randy Forbes introduced a House resolution, H. Res. 888, that purported to promote "education on America's history of religious faith." In fact, the resolution was packed with 75 assertions, most of which amounted to lies and distortions of the American historical record.
Enter historian Chris Rodda, author of Liars For Jesus: The Religious Right's Alternate Version of American History and also head researcher for The Military Religious Freedom Foundation. In January 2008, Rodda began an ongoing series, at the website Talk To Action (disclosure: this author is co-founder of Talk To Action), which disproved House Resolution 888's numerous historical fallacies.
The resolution contained a list of 75 historical assertions. HR 888 began as follows:
"Affirming the rich spiritual and religious history of our Nation's founding and subsequent history and expressing support for designation of the first week in May as `American Religious History Week' for the appreciation of and education on America's history of religious faith."
Rodda's writing was the centerpiece of an Internet-based campaign to publicize and oppose Forbes H. Res. 888, which never made it to the House floor but managed nonetheless to gain 93 co-sponsors, mostly Republicans.
Undeterred by the failure of H. Res. 888, on may 4th, 2009 Randy Forbes re-introduced the text of the resolution, as House Resolution 397, which currently has 74 co-sponsors {
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=hr111-397 } .
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