One out of 56 is not ‘most’

October 23, 2007

In Sunday night’s debate for Republican presidential candidates, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee tried to reinforce his opposition to abortion rights on historical grounds.

“There are some real issues out there in this country we need to be fighting for on behalf of the people. Now, one of them, quite frankly, I do believe, is the sanctity of human life…because I do believe that it is one of the defining issues of our culture and civilization in that it expresses our understanding that every single human being in this society has intrinsic value and worth.

“When our founding fathers put their signatures on the Declaration of Independence, those 56 brave people, most of whom, by the way, were clergymen, they said that we have certain inalienable rights given to us by our creator, and among these life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, life being one of them. I still believe that.” (emphasis added)

Now, Huckabee himself is a trained Baptist minister, so presumable he knows a bit about clergy, but apparently he doesn’t know much about history. His claim about the signers of the Declaration of Independence wasn’t even close to being true.

Only one of the 56 was an active clergyman, and that was John Witherspoon. Witherspoon was a Presbyterian minister and president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University). […]

We’d like to give Huckabee every benefit of the doubt, but even if you consider former clergymen among the signers the best you could come up with is four. Out of 56. That’s not “most,” that’s Pants-on-Fire wrong.

Of course, Huckabee was probably less concerned with being right, and more concerned with impressing the religious right. And their standards for accuracy are pretty low.

This comes up from time to time, when conservatives like John McCain and others try to argue that America is a “Christian nation.” To hear them tell it, if the nation was established by clergy, then there’s nothing wrong with intermixing religion and government.

But this is wrong on a variety of levels. First, the Founding Fathers created a separation between church and state. Second, they drafted a Constitution that makes no reference to God whatsoever. And third, not only were very few Founders actually clergy, but many were actually influenced by deism, not Christian orthodoxy.

There’s some confusion about exactly how many clergymen there were in this group, but there’s no confusion about just how wrong Huckabee is.

A few more of the signers were former clergymen, though it’s a little unclear just how many. The conservative Heritage Foundation said two other signers were former clergymen. The religion web site Adherents.com said four signers of the declaration were current or former full-time preachers. But everyone agrees only Witherspoon was an active minister when he signed the Declaration of Independence.

One issue that may contribute to the confusion about which signers had a history in the clergy is that during the time the Declaration was written, people who studied at universities often received doctorates of divinity, a common degree designation, even if they were not working clergy, said Mary Jenkins of the Independence National Historical Park.

But no matter the measurement, “most” of the Founding Fathers weren’t clergy.

Will the national media scrutinize this “gaffe”? Will Huckabee be forced to backpedal? It seems unlikely, doesn’t it?

his remarks also assume that all clergy are opposed to abortion rights.

  • Makes about as much sense as Islam-O-Fascism. So, no, the Corporate Military Industrial Media will not call the Huckle-buck on this one.

  • just bill said:
    his remarks also assume that all clergy are opposed to abortion rights.

    It also assumes they even thought about abortion, which didn’t become a political/legislative issue until the late 19th century.

  • By Huckabee’s standards, I could say that the Founding Fathers were mostly women, a claim that’s only 2% less accurate than his.

  • /sarcasm alert/
    i’m sure that this will become a well-publicized gaffe — mentioned ad nauseum in all the main stream media — on par with al gore’s highly documented claim to have invented the internet.
    /sarcasm alert ended/

  • just like huckabee’s disbelief in evolution, i’m sure the chattermonkeys will be all over ‘the man from hope’ for his moronic statements….

    right?

  • We are locked in a stupidity spiral, powered by the greed of the corporations who own the airwaves. Fasten your seatbelts and return your trays to their closed positions.

    The media won’t call any of the ChristoFascists on anything, because if they do, the brownshirted ChristoFascist minions never fail to flood the zone with moronic vitriol and that’s just bad for business. We need those morons to buy all the useless crap we’re selling. Of course now the minions have a new “fact” in their arsenal of stupidity (that all the signers were ministers), and when they don’t hear anyone else repeating that fact, they think there must be some kind of liberal conspiracy to cover it up. After all, if it wasn’t a fact, someone would tell us, right?

    HEY! That sumbitch on teevee just called me a monkey!!! GET ‘IM!!!

  • Has anyone told Huckabee that Witherspoon was a Presbyterian? It seems odd that the batsh*t brigade would embrace a Presbyterian as one of their own….

  • What Huckabee is doing is intentional. The myth that the United States was formed as a “Christian” nation is strong and Huckabee is merely repeating the lies of the Christian right. Ironic huh?

  • I’m sorry, but I have believed for years that one of the reasons people came to this country was to escape the oppression that occurs when the government and religion are inseparable; did I miss the lecture where the “life” part of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” was defined as representing an opposition to abortion?

    If we’re going to play the game of “what does ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” mean,” we can get mired down in the quagmire of semantics, and I can maintain that my interpretation of that phrase is just as valid as his – maybe more valid, given that there is legal opinion and precedent that does not support his view. He would, of course, like to appoint judges and Justices who would agree with his view, and thereby restrict the freedoms of others – which kind of puts him at odds with that “liberty” thing. One might argue that it is impossible to separate out one component of that phrase in order to make an argument for a particular view because it ends up at cross purposes with the other two components. One might speculate that these elements were purposely tied together in order to ensure that they were protected from those like Huckabee who want to steer the document in the direction that works for them, but which impinges on the rights all people are supposed to be guaranteed.

    It’s not just a gaffe; it’s a manipulation of the intent and purpose of the country’s foundational documents, which was to protect against the tyranny of the majority.

  • It bears repeating that the people who came here to “escape the oppression that occurs when the government and religion are inseparable” simply wanted to oppress other people and form their own governments which were inseperable from their religions. The religious nutbags who came here to set up their own religious havens burned “witches”, forcibly converted “heathen” natives, and IMHO planted the fruit we’re currently harvesting.

    I guess in some ways it’s a good thing that so many different bags of nuts got planted, because their disunity allowed the Deist forefathers to set up a neutral government.

  • A point to make here that the Ol’ Huckster misses is that the forebears of today’s Fundamentalists (i.e., the evangelicals of 1799) were on the side of Jefferson and separation of Church and State.

    Why.

    Because baptists were a distinct minority within the religious community at that time. If God and Govt became bounded together (as they now want it today), they would be on the outside looking in. With separation of church and state, they were free to practice their religion as they was fit.

  • Point taken, Racerx – thank goodness they saw more advantage in designing a government that would allow for everyone to have the freedom to oppress anyone they could, than there was in designing one that would just give the upper hand to whatever group stood in the majority. Now, that’s foresight!

  • He’ll get a pass on this and every crazy thing else he says, just like Hitler got a pass on everything in 1932:

    From today’s Salon War Room (italics mine)

    GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is riding high on a warm reception from “Values Voters,” an endorsement from Chuck Norris and a steady climb in Iowa polls. Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter goes so far as to pitch him as possibly “the only Republican candidate with a decent chance to beat the Democrats next November.”

    “Even on faith and politics, Mike is easy to like,” Alter writes. “From afar, he seemed extreme because he raised his hand in a debate when the candidates were asked en masse if they believed in intelligent design. But when Bill Maher pressed him to justify that view on his HBO show, Huckabee responded with a nuanced and presentable discussion of the origins of the universe that seemed to pacify even the atheist host.”

    See, when a Democrat has a “nuanced” explanation for something, that’s bad. When a Republican is “nuanced,” he or she’s just being reasonable.

    Let’s watch how Huckabee and Alter do it.

    Alter says that Huckabee “raised his hand in a debate when the candidates were asked en masse if they believed in intelligent design.” In fact, what the candidates were asked at the GOP presidential debate on May 4 was to raise their hands if they did not “believe in evolution.” Huckabee raised his.

    Immediately after the debate, Huckabee said that it was “fine with me” if other people want to believe that they “came from apes.” “I’ll accept that,” he said. “I just don’t happen to think that I did.”

    But by the time Huckabee appeared on Bill Maher’s show in August, he had that more “nuanced” view on evolution. “It’s not a proper yes-or-no question,” he said. “Do I believe that it is all about just random selection, that it just happened without any design, designer, anybody behind it? No I don’t believe that, I think there was a God behind that.”

    When Maher asked Huckabee if he believed that man came from monkeys, he said: “I don’t know.”

    At a press conference Monday, Huckabee suggested that reporters read Alter’s “very thoughtful” piece, saying that he thought the columnist had gotten it right.

    A reporter asked Huckabee how he thought his views — including his view on evolution — might play in the general election.

    “Oh, I believe in science. I certainly do,” he said. “In fact, what I believe in is, I believe in God. I don’t think there’s a conflict between the two. But if there’s going to be a conflict, science changes with every generation and with new discoveries and God doesn’t. So I’ll stick with God if the two are in conflict.”

  • On October 23rd, 2007 at 10:25 am, Racerx said:

    It bears repeating that the people who came here to “escape the oppression that occurs when the government and religion are inseparable” simply wanted to oppress other people and form their own governments which were inseparable from their religions.

    Good point, but remember that the “pilgrims” came here from Holland. They had religious freedom in Holland. Nobody was persecuting them there.

    Also New York was euro-settled by the Dutch first. They came to make $. Ditto the English at Jamestown.

  • At 13

    On October 23rd, 2007 at 10:38 am, Anne said:….thank goodness they saw more advantage in ……………..

    Many of the founders were children of the enlightenment. In this regard, the religious wars that ravaged europe during the preceding century were fresh in mind the Constitution was written.

    A theocracy was not a form of government that was thought of as a good thing.

  • How many had degrees in doctorate’s of divinity? Why don’t you go write about Hillary…has she taken vows of atheism yet….I’ll start listening to your revisionist history lessons then. You are pollution to the Truth.

  • I was just rereading the constitution and sure enough it says, “life starting from the point of conception and ending just before capital punishment, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”

  • RSA said:

    By Huckabee’s standards, I could say that the Founding Fathers were mostly women, a claim that’s only 2% less accurate than his.

    🙂 Actually to say they were all atheists is probably more accurate than Huckabee.

  • Will the national media scrutinize this “gaffe”? Will Huckabee be forced to backpedal? It seems unlikely, doesn’t it?

    A lie is not a gaffe, and we already know the media is deaf to ReThuglican lies. So … nope.

  • If you stretch the definintion, the Constitution makes three references to God (or religion): It mentions the “Year of the Lord” (but it also gives the date in relation to the revolution), while second and third are the Disestablishment clause and the lack of religious test for office.

    Facts such as these fail to deter the meme that we are a “Christian nation” but they are handy when someone gets boring about it. There was an op-ed in our local paper that not only proclaimed the US a Christian nation, but also said that the end of the world would be hastened by the election of a woman president. The writer went on to say that the Muslim and Christian nations of the world would not respect us for having a woman head of state.

    If you are concerned that such idiocy will be swallowed in the heart of Republican country, don’t worry. The paper had so many opposing letters that it could not publish them all.

    Nonsense is nonsense no matter where it is promulgated and is usually seen as such unless you have to believe otherwise.

  • The writer went on to say that the Muslim and Christian nations of the world would not respect us for having a woman head of state.

    Yikes. Glad to hear this got slammed on. Still, annoying that it came up. One really has to wonder about the author. It isn’t the other nations who have problems with women as President, it is this country.

    I doubt Christian England or Christian Germany would lose respect for us, since they’ve already elected women as heads of state. But maybe the rest of the world has no respect for them either. And the world didn’t seem to suddenly shun the Christian-Muslim mixed Phillipines for President Arroyo. And Bhutto seems to draw big crowds (again – having been head of state twice already in the past) in Muslim Pakistan. I could go on and on, but seriously, we are so far behind the curve in having a female head of state that one has to wonder what brand of stupid pills the opinion writer was taking.

  • Thomas Jefferson wrote at great length about these religious nut jobs that came to America to set up their own theocracy to war with other theocracies nearby. They scared the hell out of Jefferson. Why Hucklebee and others can’t see how these religious groups would become corrupted if given governmental authority based on the history of these groups anytime this mixture occurred and the separation of church and state was not present shows that he knows nothing of history. Certainly not enough to learn from it.
    Remember this comes from someone who believes that dinosaurs roamed the earth 10,000 yrs ago at the same time as man and the ice age never happened.

    They are in the habit of making up their own reality but history becomes more difficult to make up.(though they’ve done a good job about the history of Jesus the attorney)

  • Is this more of that fuzzy math we kept hearing the Deciderer talk (incoherently) about? Or is this more of that segregationist stuff: one clergyman is equal to 50 regular people?

    And did anyone else hear the buzzing of a religiously insane pea-brain somewhere in the comments? Hard to make out what was being said in between the hypocrisy, lies, and insults.

  • How many had degrees in doctorate’s of divinity? — Paul Thompson, @17

    Would you then say that every modern-day PhD (Philosophy Doctor) is a philosopher? Obviously, you don’t know much about the history of universities — all the way back to the Middle Ages — what they taught, and the way they conferred their titles…

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