There is a curious new YouTube video showing Glen Urquhart, one of the Republican candidates for Delaware’s congressional seat, transforming Thomas Jefferson into Adolf Hitler.
This is not a spoof. Urquhart, a Sussex County developer, is seen at a Republican candidates forum in April in Greenwood. He is discussing how the phrase “separation of church and state” came to be.
Urquhart contradicts an unseen speaker trying to say — correctly — that Jefferson used the wording in a famous letter he wrote in 1802 to the Danbury Baptists in Connecticut.
“That exact phrase was not in Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists,” Urquhart says.
“The exact phrase ‘separation of church and state’ came out of Adolf Hitler’s mouth. That’s where it comes from. The next time your liberal friends talk about separation of church and state, ask them why they’re Nazis.”
Celia adds some nice blogger snark: So that would explain why George Washington had to talk Betsy Ross out of designing the Stars & Stripes with a field of blue decorated with 13 little swastikas.
Here is the relevant text of the Jefferson letter:
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & 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 & State
As you can tell, Thomas Jefferson is some kind of communist. You can see why Texas wanted to cut Jefferson out of their textbooks, his plain words are inconvenient to people pushing theocracy. Urquhard is demonstrating the kind of deep intellectual analysis that we expect from Fox News Republicans. It’s Godwin’s Law on steroids, which has been an epidemic lately.