The men and women who signed the Declaration of Independence
Last edited Wed Feb 29, 2012, 05:24 PM - Edit history (1)
Arrrrghhh!!!
One thing in Santorum's utterly insane, hateful, victory speech (to celebrate having just lost Michigan) really jumped out at me...
He lays down his usual rap about the Declaration of Independence because it is the one and only thing associated with the founding fathers that alludes to any notion of a deity (The Constitution does not, and that wasn't an accident.)
Us book-learned SNOBS know that "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights" does not really mean that a supernatural G-O-D gave us rights. We know this because Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the fucking thing, did not believe in a supernatural G-O-D. He believed that some mysterious thing or another set the universe in motion with natural laws in place, never to be heard from again. Thomas Jefferson is currently burning in Hell, in Rick Santorum's stated worldview.
"Endowed by their creator" is a philosophical structure, stating the existence of certain natural rights essentially a priori. They are not man-made, they are (to Jefferson) natural and unalienable ("inalienable" is the usual word, but they didn't have spellcheck in 1776). That means they cannot be separated from a person... they are intrinsic, part of personhood itself. However persons came to be, by whatever agency, they came into being with human rights, in Jefferson's opinion. (The Enlightment-era theory of natural rights was a democratic counter to the divine right of kings, and so took that general form -- an assertion of a different natural order as immagined by one thinker or another.)
But anyway, little Ricky makes that solitary use of the word "creator" as a centerpiece of his stump speech.
In tonight's version he went through the usual speil and then added an observation about what was being said by "the men and women who signed the Declaration of Independence."
Needless to say, no woman signed the Declaration of Independence. Nor did anyone of color nor any native American nor, for that matter, any white man who did not own property. Duh!
This misrepresenation is not just Santorum being a dumb-ass. This is from the same playbook as those who say the Constitution guaranteed the rights of all people, even though the Constitution permitted the ownership of human beings as slaves. Remember Michelle Bachman's bit about how the drafters of our Constitution worked tirelessly against slavery?
If you are going to rant nonsense about the only valid Constitution being as it was first written (strict constructionism, aka constitutional fundementalism—a religious and somewhat mystical approach to statecraft) then it is necessary to make up a fake version of the Constitution, and of all early American history where women, and persons of color, and native Americans had the rights of citizenship.
All calls to return to the past require this sort of whitewash because the past had its problems, at least for most people. When they talk about "the excesses of the 1960s" they are referring to the civil rights act, the voting rights act, entry of many more women into the workforce and college, Griswold v. Connecticut (contraception), Loving v. Virginia (interracial marriage)... which of those excesses could anyone trying to win a general election oppose in speciffic? Yet the excesses of the 1960s meme is so accepted that even Obama once spoke of it, if I recall correctly.
Selling people on returning to our glorious past demands a litterally Orwellian approach. We have always been at war with Eastasia. Women have always been able to vote.
= new reply since forum marked as read
do you think they would actually read the Declaration and use their thinking process
to try to understand what the hell Jefferson was saying? Of course not, they see "creator"
and go with slickricky on the rest cause that thinking stuff is hard werk.
(spelling is my perogative)
