The more I read of Bill Federer's work, the more he appears to be a poor man's David Barton. Everything is so utterly simplistic it's unreal. Consider the conclusion of this article published, naturally, in Worldnetdaily:
America's founders had a "deity-based" belief system. Why? Because:1. Your rights cannot be taken away by the government if they come from a power "higher" than the government, i.e., God;
2. There are no second-class citizens if each person is equal because each is made in the image of God
Well let's think about this. If the founding fathers believed that your rights couldn't be taken away because they came from God and not government, why did they turn around almost before the ink was dry on the first amendment and pass the Sedition Act? That act was a flagrant violation of freedom of the press, and many prominent newspaper publishers were thrown in jail for criticizing the government. Obviously government CAN take away your rights even if they previously claimed that those rights "came from God". The irony is that the fight to do away with the Sedition Act was led by Jefferson, the one proclaimed to be a heathen and an infidel in the election of 1800 and the one who rejected the divinity of Jesus and the validity of most of the bible.
And if there are no second-class citizens if our rights came from God, as the founders supposedly believed, why did they write a Constitution that not only declared black slaves to be second class citizens, but didn't even classify them as full human beings! Under the original constitution, they only counted as 3/5 of a human being. So Federer quotes the founding fathers to support the notion that you must believe in God in order to avoid having second class citizens, but ignores the reality that those same founding fathers DID believe in second class citizens and wrote a constitution that explicitly declared a large percentage of the population to not even be fully human. It takes real talent to juggle such contradictions.