Tim Pool, a Trump-supporting anti-LGBTQ+ broadcaster who was paid by the Russian government to push Russian propaganda and disinformation to American audiences, has claimed that the 4th, 5th, and 6rh amendments in the U.S. Constitution were all derived from the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah.
In the Biblical story, God rains hellfire upon the two towns of Sodom and Gomorrah for their unrighteousness and unlawfulness after the townspeople threaten to harm two of God’s angelic messengers. Anti-LGBTQ+ Christian fundamentalists repeatedly say the towns were destroyed for tolerating homosexuality, but that’s a narrow reading of the entire tale.
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Regardless, in a recent broadcast with Milo Yiannopoulos — an ex-gay right-wing troll who was largely disowned by conservatives after he said he was personally grateful that a priest molested him as a child because it made him good at oral sex — Pool argued that the that United States was founded as a Christian nation.
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During his argument, Pool said, “Do you know why the Founding Fathers created the 4th, 5th, and 6th [Amendments]? It’s the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. It is literally as the spoken word of the Founding Fathers. Benjamin Franklin said, ‘It is better that 100 guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer,’ which was a play on [The British jurist William] Blackstone’s formulation; it is better that 10 guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer which is literally the story of Sodom and Gomorrah [where God said] ‘If but one righteous person exists, I will not destroy this land.’ It was literally the Bible, which is why they said we should enshrine this in the Constitution.”
The hate speech watchdog group Right Wing Watch called Pool’s comments “largely incoherent and uninformed.” Benjamin Franklin had nothing to do with the writing of the Bill of Rights which occurred around 1789. James Madison drafted out the amendments based on recommendations from other U.S. states that were ratifying their own founding documents. The Bill of Rights largely enumerated protections against certain actions taken against U.S. colonialists by British imperial forces.
The 4th Amendment protects U.S. citizens against unreasonable searches and seizure by the government. The 5th Amendment states that no one can be deprived of “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The 6th Amendment lays out citizen rights in court trials. None of them have anything to do with the aforementioned Biblical story.
