Even with a former history professor serving as host, Fox News has trouble getting it correct. On One Nation Under God Saturday night, Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich bent and tweaked historical data to support the premise that America’s Christians are somehow an endangered majority.
Gingrich’s special took an odd tack: rather than examining philosophy, Gingrich used monuments in the Washington DC area to illustrate encroaching progressive secularism. The older monuments – like those to Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln are built on a grand scale designed to lead visitor’s eyes heavenward to an all-powerful deity. Modern monuments, like those to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Vietnam veterans are on a smaller scale, and they frequently lack inspiring words of scripture as part of their design.
Only in the statue depicting women nurses in Vietnam does a visitor find one of the figures gazing towards the heavens, Gingrich laments. Backed up by right-wing pundits like Charles Kesler of the Claremont Institute, Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice and Canadian writer Mark Steyn, Gingrich unearths just about every public statement mentioning a Divine Creator from Washington to the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr.
Let’s break the argument into two separate categories. If it is true, as Gingrich contends that size matters, then there is no shortage of large edifices around the world. Such a list might reasonably include Mayan Temples, the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower and the Jefferson Davis monument. In regards to the later obelisk, there is a significant portion of the US population who presumably will take exception to the cause to which Davis dedicated a significant portion of his life.
On to the Biblical imagery. As any student who has read through 19th century literature can attest, language used back then was considerable more florid than the speech we employ today. Gingrich hastily glosses over a statement by founding father Thomas Jefferson:
Believing that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their Legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church and State (Letter to the Danbury Baptists, 1802).
By taking this tactic, Gingrich tries to emphasize his case that the boggy man of secularization only began occurring after World War II. The former speaker points to Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a man of God whose memorial has been diminished by failure to include some of the Depression-era Presidents references to God. Once more FDR’s monument does not depict him with is "iconic" cigarette and cigarette holder, but does show him using a wheelchair.
By making FDR a victim of the PC police, Gingrich tries to make the case that the four term President’s legacy has been diminished. Of course, Gingrich fails to observe that times have changed since FDR’s tenure at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Back then there were even doctors who wrote testimonials about the health benefits of various cigarettes. The most famous photo of FDR smoking shows him on his way to his first inaugural. Plenty of photos do not show him smoking.
While it’s true that FDR was rarely photographed using his wheelchair, public attitudes have changed towards people with disabilities. During the Second World War Axis propagandist would frequently refer to disease that rendered Roosevelt paraplegic by the demeaning and derogatory term infantile paralysis.
It should be noted that Gingrich is an unlikely person to heap accolades upon FDR. The former speaker has long endorsed privatizing Social Security, a move which many economist say would effectively dismantle FDR’s most enduring legacy.
And the speech which FDR is most remembered for does not contain explicit references to a deity. Roosevelt’s signature speech was the one about four freedoms. Those freedoms are listed on the monument.
Gingrich, who is ostensibly on the side of King, has nonetheless previously gone on record as being opposed to affirmative action. Affirmative action, flawed though it may be, is the mechanism that has helped many reach the dream envisioned by the slain civil-rights leader.
Gingrich closes the program by wishing viewers a Merry Christmas and a Happy Chanukah. In doing so, he inadvertently chose the wisdom behind a broader interpretation of the amendment guaranteeing that the government would not establish or promote religion. The founding fathers were a pretty homogenous group of men. There were no Koreans, African Americans or Egyptians present for the signing of the Declaration of Independence or the US Constitution. The broader interpretation of that portion of the Constitution attempts to redress the inequities suffered by those whose culture was outside the mainstream.
No Winter Solstice, no Samhain and no Yule. Is it any wonder that many people simply wish each other Happy Holidays?
And so we have established that right-wingers have trouble with math, trouble with spelling, trouble with history and now, trouble with social studies.
Maybe we could find a position for a No Child Left Behind teacher in a gym class somewhere.