Dr. Woody'z Fabulous, Fascinating Factoids: Pious Pin-headed Preachers.

With all the fabled folderol of Thanksgiving on the horizon, these days you cannot swing a cat without bumping up against the despicable revisionist "history" propogated by the pious pinheads of the Wackloon/Fundie/Cristo-Right. David Barton, anyone? 

The charlatans are EVERYWHERE. The latest to join the fray was that pious pinhead, the AFA's Tony Perkins, who was out last week, in advance of the 'seasonal remembrances' spreading the falsehoods about the "religious" origins of the USofA, and of the colonists fleeing oppression, seeking 'freedom' in the New World. Perkins claimed that the Puritans' departure from Europe to seek 'religious freedom' presages and authorizes their contemporary "right" to deny birth-control to the population in general because it offends THEIR principles..

No, I'm NOT making that up. I've left the link in the comments below.

The story of the Puritans is one of the most cherished, and most abused, myths of the Colonial era.. 

Even though the lies are embeded in the national "exceptionality" narrative, somebody needs to instruct the these holy dickwads and fuckwitted, cretinous "preachers" that only a tiny fraction of the earliest colonists came for "religious freedom." 

Of the original 10 colonies, only those in "New England" were founded by Puritan religious zealots. The vast majority of the REST of the colonists came for the chance to make a buck/pound/guilder by exploiting the "New World." They were a population, in the words of a contemporary observer, of Murtherers, Theeves, Adulterers, [and] idle persons.” Such a description, indeed, fir the vast MAJORITY of our "first citizens."

And those religious zealots--the Pilgrims--left Europe only because it afforded them the opportunity to practice religious EXCLUSIONISM. The Puritans could NOT abide living in communities with those who were NOT of their particular, primitive, fundamentalist persuasion. They expelled those whom they couls, and fled from the rest.

They were self-exiled from Britain, settled in "Holland," where they were deemed too reactionary even for the tolerant Dutch, and were forced to migrate to the New World--- where, everyone profoundly hoped, they would just die out.

The "religious" history of the colonies is a part and parcel of the same "exceptionalist" propaganda which has polluted our national discourse for more than 200 years. So, let's just be clear, here. "Religion" provided only the slightest impetus to the colonization of the East Coast, outside Massachusetts and Connecticut. And it is fundamentally dishonest to pretend otherwise.