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Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow writes letter full of fake history to USMMA to defend giant Jesus painting [1]

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Date: 2023-02-28  

Another voice from the Christian nationalist peanut gallery is protesting the Military Religious Freedom Foundation’s (MRFF) victory in getting the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy (USMMA) to move its giant Jesus painting from the Elliot M. See conference room in its Wiley Hall administrative building to the Academy’s chapel.

On February 24, Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow’s American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) published an article on its website titled “US Merchant Marine Academy Succumbs to Anti-Religious Bigot Demands Regarding Jesus Painting,” deriding MRFF as “an anti-Christian organization that roams the country committed to ridding the public square of all religious expression.” (In reality, 95% of MRFF clients, including some of those who came to MRFF about this painting, are Christians.)

What’s notable about the ACLJ’s article is that it neglects to mention that the painting is being moved to the Academy’s chapel, where it will be on display for all who wish to view it. It’s not like they’re tossing the painting in a dumpster or hiding it away in some storage room, which is the impression that someone reading this deceptive article might get. But eliciting outrage is the goal of the ACLJ, and letting their followers think the painting is being tossed or hidden away works better for that.

The article links to the ACLJ’s February 20 “legal letter,” as they repeatedly call it, to USMMA’s superintendent, Vice Admiral Joanna M. Nunan, a 12-page-long missive as is typical for the ACLJ, much of which is devoted to bashing MRFF, and most of the rest of which is irrelevant to the situation at hand.

What actual legal arguments there are in this “legal letter” differ little from the legal arguments of the five Christian nationalist MAGA congressmen who wrote to Vice Admiral Nunan and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and whose easily rebutted legal arguments I already addressed in my previous post “Five MAGA congressmen on a crusade to get Merchant Marine Academy ginormous Jesus painting uncovered.”

But the ACLJ’s letter also contains a good deal of Christian nationalist revisionist history, with a good chunk of one of its paragraphs chock full of lies about Thomas Jefferson. Why Thomas Jefferson? Because the Christian nationalist history revisionists love to claim that even Thomas Jefferson, one of the least religious of the founders and the man who coined the phrase “separation between church and state” supported government promotions of Christianity. The problem is that he didn’t, so the Christian nationalists have to lie, as the ACLJ does in the following claims in its “legal letter”:

President Thomas Jefferson—a man often described as a strong defender of strict church state separation—signed multiple Congressional acts to support Christian missionary activity among the Indians. Further, during his presidency, President Jefferson also approved a curriculum for schools in the District of Columbia which used the Bible and a Christian hymnal as the primary texts to teach reading, and he signed the Articles of War which "[e]amestly recommended to all officers and soldiers, diligently to attend divine services." Also, once the U.S. Navy was formed, Congress enacted legislation directing the holding of, and attendance at, divine services aboard U.S. Navy ships.

Sekulow’s first claim — that Jefferson “signed multiple Congressional acts to support Christian missionary activity among the Indians — is completely untrue. Thomas Jefferson never signed a single congressional act providing for Christian missionary activity among the Indians, let alone “multiple congressional acts” as Sekulow claims.

Sekulow footnotes this claim with the following:

See Daniel L. Dreisbach, Real Threat and Mere Shadow: Religious Liberty and the First Amendment 127 (1987) (noting that the 1803 treaty with the Kaskaskia Indians included federal funds to pay a Catholic missionary priest; noting further treaties made with the Wyandotte and Cherokee tribes involving state-supported missionary activity).

During his presidency, Thomas Jefferson signed over forty treaties with various Indian nations. The 1803 treaty with the Kaskaskia is the only one that contained anything whatsoever having to do with religion, and even that one had nothing to do with promoting “Christian missionary activity among the Indians.” No other Indian treaty signed by Jefferson, including the other two used by Sekulow in his footnote, contained any mention of religion at all.

When Jefferson signed the treaty with the Kaskaskia in 1803, these Indians were already Catholic and had been for generations. They had begun converting to Catholicism in the late 1600s after a Jesuit priest from France, Father Jacques Marquette, first encountered them in 1673 while exploring the Mississippi River with Louis Jolliet. By 1803, “the greater part of the said tribe have been baptized and received into the Catholic Church,” as Article 3 of the treaty signed by Jefferson states.

Lies like this one used by Sekulow always use words like “Christian missionary” to make it sound as if that Jefferson was trying to convert the Indians to Christianity. Obviously, this was not the case with the Kaskaskia treaty, since these Indians were already Catholic. The support of a priest and help building a new church were among the provisions that the Kaskaskia asked for in exchange for ceding nine million acres of land to the United States, not something the government was pushing on them.

As Jefferson was well aware, there was nothing unconstitutional about granting these provisions. This was a treaty with a sovereign nation. It was not an act of Congress as Sekulow claims. As was made very clear in a lengthy 1796 debate in the House of Representatives on the treaty making power, unless a treaty provision threatened the rights or interests of American citizens, there was no constitutional reason not to allow it, even if that same provision would be unconstitutional in a law made by Congress for the American people.

So what of the other two treaties in Sekulow’s footnote? Well, here he is being completely dishonest about what the source he cites actually says. In no way did Daniel L. Dreisbach say in his book Real Threat and Mere Shadow that these treaties with the Wyandottes and Cherokees involved state-supported missionary activity. This book says the exact opposite. These treaties were mentioned because they didn’t contain any religious provisions. What they did contain were provisions for money that wasn’t designated for a particular purpose. Dreisbach used these two treaties as examples to argue that Jefferson, if he had wanted to avoid listing the provisions for religious purposes in the Kaskaskia treaty, could have done so with a provision that didn’t specify what the money was for, such as the provisions found in these Wyandotte and Cherokee treaties. So, Sekulow is not only lying about Jefferson’s actions; he is blatantly lying about what his source says to support his lie.

Sekulow’s next claim about Jefferson is also a flat out lie:

“Further, during his presidency, President Jefferson also developed a school curriculum for the District of Columbia that used the Bible and a Christian hymnal as the primary texts to teach reading ...”

This popular lie was concocted by taking the fact that in 1805, while serving as President of the United States, Jefferson was named as president of the brand new Washington, D.C. school board, and then combining that fact with an 1813 report from a school in Washington that was using the Bible and a hymnal as reading texts. The problem with this story? The school in question didn’t even exist when Jefferson was president. It didn’t open until 1812 — three years after Jefferson had left Washington.

Sekulow’s footnote for this lie is:

John W. Whitehead, The Second American Revolution 100 (1982) (citing 1 J.O. Wilson, Public Schools of Washington 5 (1897).

Here, Sekulow is citing a revisionist history book that claims to be citing another source. But that source, J.O. Wilson’s Public Schools of Washington, does not support the claim made by John W. Whitehead and repeated by Sekulow. In fact, J.O. Wilson’s book debunks this claim.

Jefferson had nothing whatsoever to do with developing the curriculum for any school in Washington, D.C., not even the ones that actually did exist during his presidency. The school in Sekulow’s lie didn’t even open until 1812, three years after Jefferson’s presidency ended.

Here’s how the lie was concocted:

Jefferson was elected president of the school board in 1805 (at a meeting that he didn’t even attend), but, according to the minutes of the school board, never took an active role in this position. His only actual involvement was to make a donation of $200 when money was being raised to start the school system.

The Washington, D.C. school board attempted to establish and maintain two public schools beginning in 1806. These first two schools were the only schools that existed in Washington during Jefferson’s presidency. When the city council decided to cut the public funding for these schools in half in 1809, one of the two schools was forced to close. The school buildings had been paid for with private donations, but the school board couldn’t afford to pay high enough salaries to hire and keep qualified teachers.

In 1811, two years after the end of Jefferson’s presidency, the teacher of a Lancasterian school that had been opened in Georgetown wrote to the Washington school board suggesting that this type of school might solve their problem. Lancasterian schools used a plan of education developed by Joseph Lancaster in England as an economical way to educate large numbers of poor children. By using the older students to teach the younger ones, Lancaster’s method allowed one teacher to oversee the education of hundreds of children. The school in Georgetown was teaching three hundred and fifty students with one teacher. In 1812, the Washington school board decided to try the Lancasterian method, and Henry Ould, a teacher trained by Joseph Lancaster in England, was brought over to run this new Lancasterian school.

In 1813, Mr. Ould submitted a progress report to the school board in which he said that the Bible and Watts’s Hymns were being used as reading texts. This 1813 report, when anachronistically combined with the fact that Jefferson had been elected school board president eight years earlier, is used to make the completely false claim that Sekulow makes in his letter — that Jefferson “developed a school curriculum for the District of Columbia that used the Bible and a Christian hymnal.”

Moving on to Sekulow’s next claim, that Jefferson:

“signed the Articles of War which ‘[e]amestly recommended to all officers and soldiers, diligently to attend divine services.’”

Jefferson had nothing to do with creating this regulation. It was part of the Articles of War passed by the Continental Congress in 1775, most of which, for the sake of expediency, had been copied nearly word for word from the British Articles of War.

The Continental Congress did change the part of the British version of this article that made attendance at religious services mandatory, making it a recommendation only and removing the failure to attend religious services from the article’s punishable offenses, but left the rest of the article the same except for slight changes to the punishment.

This was the British version:

All Officers and Soldiers, not having just Impediment, shall diligently frequent Divine Service and Sermon, in the Places appointed for the assembling of the Regiment, Troop, or Company, to which they belong; such as wilfully absent themselves, or, being present, behave indecently or irreverently, shall, if Commissioned Officers be brought before a Court-martial, there to be publickly and severely reprimanded by the President; if Non-commissioned Officers, or Soldiers, every Person so offending, shall, for his First Offence, forfeit Twelve-pence, to be deducted out his next Pay; for the Second Offence, he shall not only forfeit Twelve-pence, but be laid in Irons for Twelve Hours; and for every like Offence, shall suffer and pay in like Manner: Which Money, so forfeited, shall be applied to the Use of the sick Soldiers of the Troop or Company to which the Offender belongs.

And this was the version as changed by the Continental Congress:

It is earnestly recommended to all officers and soldiers, diligently to attend Divine Service; and all officers and soldiers who shall behave indecently or irreverently at any place of Divine Worship, shall, if commissioned officers, be brought before a court-martial, there to be publicly and severely reprimanded by the President; if non-commissioned officers or soldiers, every person so offending, shall, for his first offence, forfeit One Sixth of a Dollar, to be deducted out of his next pay; for the second offence, he shall not only forfeit a like sum, but be confined for twenty-four hours, and for every like offence, shall suffer and pay in like manner; which money so forfeited, shall be applied to the use of the sick soldiers of the troop or company to which the offender belongs.

When Congress decided in 1804 that the Revolutionary War era Articles of War needed to be updated, it was done by simply adding all of the new regulations, while leaving the old regulations as they were, so this regulation recommending attendance at worship services remained in the act that added the new regulations, the final version of which was passed in 1806 and signed by Jefferson. But Christian nationalists like Sekulow leave out the actual history of the Articles of War, and what, exactly, Jefferson signed so they can make it appear that Jefferson — Mr. Separation of Church and State himself — was responsible for recommending that soldiers go to church.

Sekulow’s last claim — that “once the U.S. Navy was formed, Congress enacted legislation directing the holding of, and attendance at, divine services aboard U.S. Navy ships” — had nothing whatsoever to do with Jefferson, as Sekulow’s grouping it with his lies about Jefferson serves to imply. There actually was such a regulation, but it was passed during the Adams administration, when the Federalists — the Christian nationalists of their day — controlled Congress. This mandatory church attendance aboard ships went on to be widely protested by Navy officers in the mid-1800s, during a widespread, but unsuccessful, national movement to abolish the military’s and all other government chaplaincies.

If Sekulow is going to claim that his letter to Vice Admiral Nunan is to “correct the many erroneous legal arguments made by Mr. Michael L. ‘Mikey’ Weinstein,” as he says in the letter, he might want to do so with a letter that isn’t full of erroneous history.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/28/2155450/-Trump-lawyer-Jay-Sekulow-writes-letter-full-of-fake-history-to-USMMA-to-defend-giant-Jesus-painting

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