During an interview with Religious Right radio host E.W. Jackson yesterday, Republican political operative and right-wing pseudo-historian David Barton reiterated his belief that the white people who "tied their own hands" by ending slavery in America don't get enough credit for doing so.
"There is no other nation in the world where whites fought whites to free blacks and killed over half a million whites to free blacks," Barton said. "That's a lot of people fighting slavery."
"You've also got the situation where that the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, they're voted for—they're all civil rights amendments, but guess what? The only guys that could vote back then were white guys," he added. "You've got two-thirds of the whites in Congress and the majority of the whites in three-fourths of the states that said, 'You know what? We white guys want to tie our hands and make sure that blacks have the same rights that we do.' It's whites that were doing that. You never hear anything about that."
"You hear that whites are all racist," Barton complained. "No, no, no. You've got all these whites that fought and gave their lives so that blacks would not be slaves. You have all these whites who tied their own hands politically to make sure we had equal rights in the Constitution. So there are so many good stories we just don't get."
