UPDATED::David Barton’s New Project: What is Keep the Promise Super PAC?

An addendum of sorts:: Ted Cruz Speaks At David Barton’s Legislative Conference

As Throckmorton notes concerning Barton's appointment to head Keep the Promise PAC, "Cruz can’t be criticized directly for the fact that the PACs supporting him named Barton as the head of day to day operations. However, Cruz can be criticized for lending his credibility to Barton’s work when he speaks at Barton’s pastors briefing.   Cue Alan Noble’s article on how to revitalize young conservatives."

What interests me about Noble's piece, besides that it was written two years ago, it's spot on and still pertinent today.

But Cruz has chosen to associate with David Barton and speak at his conference, a conference with a very specific worldview which has been defined by Barton. Whether he likes it or not, this action by Cruz signals something to voters. It signals that he believes Barton to be an ally and a legitimate political figure. By participating in this conference, he is implicitly lending support to Barton and his work.
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Barton is a fraud and a hack, as is Beck and Boykin. These figures should not have direct influence on conservatives and evangelicals, but they do. They do, in part, because politicians like Cruz don’t have the integrity and boldness to ignore them, which is what they must do if they want conservatism to have credibility,,,. The problem is that in this case, established conservative leaders are the ones who support and promote these fools. Barton continues to have influence in conservative politics, especially in Texas, in part because politicians respect him, listen to him, and participate in his political events.

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So earlier this month, Warren Throckmorton passed this little tid-bit along,

Bloomberg news is reporting that David Barton has become leader of a Super-PAC with ties to Ted Cruz.

Keep the Promise PAC raised more money in the first half of the year than any other Super-PAC besides Jeb Bush’s, according to Bloomberg.

Well, to me, this mean Ted Cruz would rather be president of the Wallbuilders’ Fan Club than the U.S. It has sometimes been hard to get media to pay attention to Barton’s wild claims but this appointment may now make it easier.

Later that same day, Throckmorton delved a bit deeper 

Bloomberg broke the story today that David Barton has been appointed to lead the umbrella Super PAC Keep the Promise. The PAC supports Ted Cruz but is structured in a curious manner. There are actually several PACs which supported Cruz, four of which named Keep the Promise. It is not completely clear to me that Barton will lead all of them.
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The Wilks brothers sound like they have attended a David Barton seminar. They are wasting their money preaching to the choir. People outside the bubble don’t buy it. They also run a church called Assembly of Yahweh which sounds like a 7th Day Adventist style church.

What some may not be aware of, the Wilks bothers, are low key versions of the Kochs,

Farris and Dan Wilks, billionaires who made their fortunes in the West Texas fracking boom, have given $15 million of the $38 million that the pro-Cruz super PAC, Keep the Promise, will disclose in election filings next week, according to sources outside the super PAC with knowledge of the giving. 

The siblings earned their riches with the sale of their company Frac Tech for $3.5 billion in 2011, and since then have shuffled large contributions to the leading social conservative nonprofit groups that aren't required to reveal their donors. But they will no longer be able to avoid detection after giving a historically large and early donation that now make the brothers two of America's most prominent political donors.

"Our country was founded on the idea that our rights come from the Creator, not the government. I'm afraid we're losing that," Farris Wilks, a 63-year-old pastor in the small town of Cisco, said in a statement to CNN. "Unless we elect a principled conservative leader ready to stand up for our values, we'll look back on what once was the land of opportunity and pass on a less prosperous nation to our children and grandchildren. That's why we need Ted Cruz."

But here is where things get interesting,,, 

As we all know, both Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz are pandering to the "reliosheeps" in regards to the Kim Davis Affair.  Towing the "partay" line as spouted by Huckabee that basically says, "The Supreme Court cannot overrule God."  A reaction of the Reich since the Obergefell ruling this past summer.

BUT, as Antiphon Freeman, writing for Addiction Info very nicely points out,

With Ted Cruz just now appointing David Barton as his main man at his super PAC, though, it’s going to be hard for them to keep saying that the courts have no authority in the matter. Why? Because Barton has for a very long time tried to use the power of the courts to argue that traditional marriage should be between a man and a woman – because they said so.

He cited an obscure 19[1]3 Texas Supreme Court ruling called Grigsby v. Reib, which he said proves we shouldn’t accept gay marriage.

Now that the highest court in the land has ruled on the matter and upheld it several times on appeal, he wants to conveniently forget that he once thought their opinion mattered.

You can’t have it both ways,,,

Freeman is correct and maybe (I know wishful thinking) Barton will quit with his drivel in regards to this bit of case law.  As Right Wing Watch notes, going beyond the point Freeman makes concerning the above double-standard,

Contrary to Barton's claims that this case enshrines divine principles about marriage into our civil laws, the court repeatedly notes that marriage is a nothing more than a civil contract that requires "neither license nor solemnization of religious or official ceremony" to be legally binding.

​Barton claims that this case was about trying to create a secular alternative to marriage, which the court slapped down because there can never be any legal marriage that does not correspond to "God's definition." In reality, the case addressed the issue of whether a supposedly secret verbal agreement to become husband and wife constitutes a legally binding and recognizable common law marriage and whether the relationship between Stallcup and Grigsby qualified as one under the law, with the court ruling that it did not because it didn't meet the most basic requirements.

David Barton’s New Project: What is Keep the Promise Super PAC?