Over the last few years, David Barton has been developing an ever-expanding theory that now essentially claims that all of the laws of the Bible were incorporated into the US Constitution through the Seventh Amendment, which says:

In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury shall be otherwise re–examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

In the past, Barton has claimed that parts of the Constitution were based on “direct quotations” from the Bible and has seized upon the phrase “common law” in the Seventh Amendment to argue that things like abortion and gay marriage can never be legal because they violate the “common law” which the Founding Fathers understood to mean “the laws of nature and nature’s God.”

In a presentation Barton delivered last weekend, he once again made the case that abortion and homosexuality are violations of natural law because such things, if found in nature, are always aberrations. At the same time, he has now broadened his theory to claim that there are lots of things that regularly do occur in nature – such as theft, murder, adultery, and incest – which are violations of the “laws of nature’s God” since they are explicitly outlawed in the Bible.

Combined, natural law and Biblical law make up the “common law,” Barton claims, and were therefore explicitly incorporated into the Constitution by the Founding Fathers through the Seventh Amendment.

“The laws of nature and the laws of nature’s God,” Barton said, “that’s what we find in the Scriptures and that’s what became the Seventh Amendment to the Constitution. That’s why all of the legal sources back then said Christianity is part of the common law, part of the Seventh Amendment, because it establishes the rights and wrongs. That’s why theft is out. That’s why rape is out. That’s why all these other things are out because either from the laws of nature or the laws of nature’s God we know they’re wrong”: