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Top Texas Republican Thinks Abortion Caused Global Warming

Rene Diaz, left, and David Barton chat while at the Republican National Convention at the Xcel Energy Center in 2008. CREDIT: SHUTTERSTOCK
Rene Diaz, left, and David Barton chat while at the Republican National Convention at the Xcel Energy Center in 2008. CREDIT: SHUTTERSTOCK

Scientists have a 95–100 percent certainty that humans are causing temperatures to rise, and popular evangelical leader David Barton agrees — just not exactly in the way you might think.

In a recent sit-down with televangelist Kenneth Copeland, the Texas Republican matter-of-factly reasoned that the U.S. government’s “wicked” policies are causing disastrous floods, out-of-control storms and debilitating drought. Barton said these wicked policies no doubt include the allowance of abortion, or as Copeland called it, the “murderous, bloody crop of child death.”

“[When] you open the door to killing, it’s got a lot of different manifestations,” Barton said. “When a nation does something bad, it gets a judgment or it gets blessing. … Which is why policies matter. Because if you take a bad policy you get judged for it on the spot, if you take a good policy you get blessed for it on the spot.”

God is so hot under the collar about abortion, Barton said, that he has taken his “hand of protection” off of America.

A door has been opened and we have said, you know, we embrace a wicked policy. Okay, then I’ll take my hand of protection off your nation, and whap! Here comes storms like we’ve never seen before, and here comes floods, and here comes climate stuff that we can’t explain all the hot times and all the cold times and too much rain and not enough rain and we’re flooding over here and we’ve got droughts over here.

Never mind that the most recent report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change confirmed that “it is extremely likely that more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by the anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gas concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together.” The report did not mention abortion.

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Barton is the former vice chair of the Republican Party of Texas and a popular voice among the evangelical community. He wrote a book called The Myth of Separation, in which he claimed the founding fathers only intended for Christians to hold office.

On Wednesday morning, Barton released a statement announcing he would not seek a U.S. Senate seat. He had most recently been tapped by Glenn Beck for a potential run against Texas’s incumbent Republican Senator John Cornyn. According to a report in The Blaze, more than one thousand Tea Party and conservative leaders asked Barton to run. A Facebook group called Draft David Barton For U.S. Senate (which is closed to the public) currently had more than 2,000 members as of Wednesday.

Barton initially considered a run, he said, “only if the lord tells me to do it.”

Here is a portion of Barton and Copeland’s conversation, via Right Wing Watch:

You can watch the whole conversation here.

(HT Salon.com)

Update:

This piece has been updated to reflect the news that David Barton will not run for Senate in Texas.