The media have had a good time lately with Michele Bachmann's double-down gaffe about how the Founding Fathers, including an eight-year-old John Quincy Adams, "worked tirelessly" to end slavery, despite writing it into the Constitution and owning slaves themselves.
Most reporters and pundits seem to assume this is another Palin-class face plant, along the lines of celebrating Paul Revere for warning the British and protecting gun rights. Bachmann is certainly capable of such bloopers, as in her announcement that the American Revolution started in New Hampshire.
But with the Founding Fathers and slavery story, there is a big difference. While Sarah Palin's eye-darting improvs fairly scream "I didn't do my homework," in all likelihood Bachmann did do her homework on this one. It's just that she's reading from a different text than most of us.
Bachmann, like many on the right, is a follower of the self-taught historian David Barton, a leader in a rapidly spreading movement of Christian historical revisionism. Other fans include Mike Huckabee, Glenn Beck, Texas Governor Rick Perry and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal.
Barton is, among other things, an evangelical minister, author, former Texas Republican Party vice-chair and the founder of WallBuilders, which describes itself as "an organization dedicated to presenting America's forgotten history and heroes, with an emphasis on the moral, religious, and constitutional foundation on which America was built -- a foundation which, in recent years, has been seriously attacked and undermined."
Among Barton's claims, as recounted in reports by People for the American Way and elsewhere:
The Republicans-as-civil-rights-champions argument, by the way, will be familiar to anyone who remembers North Carolina Congresswoman Virginia Foxx's eye-popping 2009 assertion that Republicans, not Democrats, passed civil rights legislation in the 60's.
Barton enjoys little respect from trained historians. He has been found to have faked quite a few of the quotations he has used to show that the founders wanted the Christian church and the state joined, not separated.
His claims about the Founders and slavery are based on uncontroversial evidence that some of the Founders disliked or had mixed feelings about the institution. But he uses that evidence to characterize slavery as a malign inheritance from the British (who ended it well before the US did) that the Founders fought to end, and to claim that liberals have deliberately smeared both the Founders and the Constitution by focusing on the negative side of the slavery legacy.
Barton believes such liberal bias distorts the history taught in our schools. An advisor to the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, he was able to play a role in the recent, controversial editing of school history texts in Texas, tilting them towards Christian revisionist, and pro-Republican, views.
The rewriting of history is a natural, and even unavoidable, consequence of the absolutism on both religion and the Constitution that characterizes Tea Party Republicanism, of which Bachmann is now the figurehead. Such absolutism requires believing that the founding text of your creed is complete and perfect, and that its authors were infallible. When reality and belief collide, reality has to give way.
So if the Founders owned slaves, and the Constitution said that was fine, there are only a few choices:
Of course, there is a hate-crazed fringe that would be fine with some version of option 1. Bachmann is not above dog-whistling to people in or near this fringe, with comments about President Obama being "anti-American." And neither is David Barton, who has been a guest speaker for the racist and anti-Semitic Christian Identity movement.
But (we can be grateful) option 1 is still off the table. So that leaves options 2 and 3.
But while it's uncontroversial that some of the Founders did not like slavery, it's also uncontroversial, or should be, that:
Uncontroversial, that is, unless you believe that reality is whatever you need it to be.
This is where Michele Bachmann, and a growing portion of the Republican Party, is coming from: if history doesn't support your beliefs, change history. The same goes for any other body of evidence, whether about climate change, evolution, or the economy.
In 2004, a Bush Administration official famously made a dismissive comment about the "reality-based community" to reporter Ron Suskind. The phrase seemed outlandish to those still in that community, who perhaps had not previously thought of reality as a lifestyle choice. But it was not at all far out to the far right.
The faith-based community they inhabit is not just a spiritual enhancement to reality. It's an alternative.
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Hey, this is a country of 300+ million people, so I'm sure you can find someone who feels that way, perhaps even a group of people…but to assert or imply that these are the thoughts/feelings of Constitutionalists would be laughable if it weren't so sad This would be laughable if it weren't so sad and blatantly misleading. Of course, if we assume that the author is not claiming the above, then he is asserting that people who believe in the Constitution somehow don't believe in the Constitution since the Constitution, Bill of Rights and other Amendments are indivisible. Hell, even the repealed Amendments are indivisible, as they are left in place, but rendered powerless, to remind us of our history.
& either way, remember that the Amendment that he claims is so "uncomfortable" wouldn't even be possible w/o the 3/5 compromise. & again, hyperbolic crap like this article, regardless of which side it comes from, does nothing but detract from honest debate…& often prevents it entirely.
Slave states would never have gone along with a Constitution that did not allow them to count their slaves in census figures, and non-slave states knew that to allow this would give slave states enormous representative power and influence in the new government. The compromise allowed slave states to count their slaves, but at a reduced number so as to a keep a balance of power. This wasn't an outright win for non-slave states, but it helped pass the Constitution while laying the groundwork for slavery's eventual abolition.
W/o the compromise there would be no Constitution, likely no US (at least as we know it), & slavery could very well still be alive today in the US. W/o the compromise, non-slave states never would have had a chance to influence the debate significantly enough to end the institution. But hey, continue to ignore these elementary facts…as long as it fits your agenda & hopefully scares enough people to your side, right?
Hyperbolic crap like this article, regardless of which side it comes from, does nothing but detract from honest debate…& often prevent it entirely.
Euro aggression is funny like that.
-John Adams
“Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.”
-Thomas Jefferson, 1814
"I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology."
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Dr. Woods
"Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is no more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory to itself than this thing called Christianity."
-Thomas Paine, “Age of Reason”
"The experience of the United States is a happy disproof of the error so long rooted in the unenlightened minds of well-meaning Christians, as well as in the corrupt hearts of persecuting usurpers, that without a legal incorporation of religious and civil polity, neither could be supported. A mutual independence is found most friendly to practical Religion, to social harmony, and to political prosperity."
-James Madison, Letter to F.L. Schaeffer, 1821
-Benjamin Franklin
"As to Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the system of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, the best the World ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupt changes, and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity; though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the Truth with less trouble.”
-Benjamin Franklin, Letter to Ezra Stiles
"When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not care to support it, so that its professors are obliged to call for the help of the civil power, 'tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one."
-Benjamin Franklin, “Poor Richard's Almanac”, 1754
-George Washington, letter to United Baptist Churches of Virginia, 1789
[Ashbel Green, a Presbyterian minister] "often said in my hearing, though very sorrowfully, of course, that while Washington was very deferential to religion and its ceremonies, like nearly all the founders of the Republic, he was not a Christian, but a Deist."
-Arthur Bradford; Presbyterian minister
"Tom, had you and I been 40 days with Moses, and beheld the great God, and even if God himself had tried to tell us that three was one and one equals three, you and I would never have believed it. We would never fall victims to such lies."
-John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson
"The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity. Nowhere in the Gospels do we find a precept for creeds, confessions, oaths, doctrines and whole carloads of other foolish trumpery that we find in Christianity."
-John Adams
Bill Clinton's New Democrats have recently nudged the present-day Dems rightward - fitting the pattern perfectly.
In the Civil War era - the Democrats and Whigs were the CONSERVATIVE parties - and the R's were the LIBERAL party, relative to the standards of the times.
It is well-documented that more contemporary R's allied themselves with supporters of Civil Rights not out of liberalism, but as a strategy to cut the legs out from under the Dixiecrats - the long-range outcome being that a southern conservative is now almost always a Republican - and conservative Republicans have pretty much driven their more moderate fellows in the northwest out of the party - or at least into irrelevance.
Better to view these trends not from a party identification - but from a liberal/conservative perspective, in my opinion - because while the labels shift, the fundamental philosophies underlying them generally don't...
Everything.
To paraphrase Keyser Soze, the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was not convincing us that he didn't exist. It was convincing Liberal America, that we're a Conservative Nation. How else can you explain a country with word UNION in it's own name, could today, be so anti-union?
As we watch the world riot for more rights, we just passively get walked over.
In Wisconsin we talk of recals, but remember, 50% of the voters voted these *ssholes in. We are a country of Lemmings.