Ethics

Hitchens Distorts Franklin's Religion

By Ed Brayton

I saw this Youtube video at Balko's blog of Christopher Hitchens debating the utterly dense Ken Blackwell about whether this is a Christian nation or not. Balko says Hitchens "annihilates" Blackwell, and that is true. Blackwell babbles like an idiot for most of it. But what jumped out at me was something Hitchens said that just grinds on me because it is so blatantly false and it is being presented by someone who so often speaks for causes I believe in.

Speaking about the Declaration of Independence, when Ken Blackwell mentions the notion of unalienable rights being self-evident, Hitchens says, "The person who put in the words 'self-evident' on that committee was Benjamin Franklin, who was undoubtedly an atheist." But this is every bit as transparent a lie as anything David Barton has ever said.

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on April 13, 2009 (boomark / email).