On the idolatry of the Founding Fathers:

[underlankers]

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,
that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

There is a certain strand of politics in the United States that reveres the generation of George Washington as a group of demigods. The

Comments

[meus_ovatio]

Why is it that everyone has all of a sudden devoted a significant fraction more of their time writing about what other people think? Isn't writing, as a form of communication, simply for telling people what you think?

[underlankers]

Because writing about what other people think is easier than coming up with ideas of your own. Writing as a medium was originally used to ensure that accountants had the right tools, so I'd say that "yes, now it is." ;P

straw men

[russj]

Because it is easier to argue against straw men then against what other people really think.

[notmrgarrison]

"This journal is the collective property of the Superhuman Crew, a group of people that are aware how insane we sound to be saying this sort of thing....and really not that interested in criticism of our insanity. "

What is the point in discussing things with you?

Is your point that the constitution isn't a religious text?
Sounds good to me.

That the founding fathers were horrible people and we should gut the constitution?
Zzzzzzzz.

[underlankers]

My point is that we owe the Founders' ideas the same respect that they gave them. If they were free to disregard them, we are under no obligation to treat their ideas with more respect than they themselves gave them.

[ledzilla]

Oh, but we are under an obligation, an obligation to do better. Otherwise words are just words. So far we fail too. Why did they have to make it so hard...

[underlankers]

Rhetoric is always just words, you will almost never find people who will live up to it. If having a silver tongue is all it takes to do good things, then any damn fool who steals someone else's words without acknowledging it can do that. The way I look at it is that what people say means less than what they do.

[luzribeiro]

Cut?

[underlankers]

Done.

[404]

People parse the Constitution out, word by word, because... words count? We have this thing called the judicial system, and the Supreme Court, whose job it is to read those tiny little words and punctuation, and make long term decisions from those insignificant little words on that piece of paper.

The founders were a product of their time. Ok, and?

Should we not deify them? Ok, but can't we appreciate the fact that given those men we have built a nation that has survived and thrived for hundred of years, or is it, as I guess you think, in spite of them.

[underlankers]

Hundreds of years? No. 222 years. Their first attempt at a system failed rapidly, the second collapsed and had to be reconstructed and redefine itself. Their achievement was real, but we have no obligation to make them saints and gods when they themselves would not have done so. The Court has no direct mandate in the writings of the Founders for judicial review, that power came about because Jefferson buggered his patronage system.

[underlankers]

More accurately they never intended to implement the Constitution they designed if it was their own ambition the Constitution would impede. Meaning the slavish devotion to the writings of the 18th Century flounders on the actions of the 18th Century.

[jerseycajun]

Their writings contained principles that, if you're advocating principle over the person, should be given real weight as opposed to the men themselves who were, like all of us, fallible.

[underlankers]

To an extent, yes. If the argument is rooted in the principle. If, however, the person writing them is invoked any mention of Jefferson's fondness for small government to justify budgets with enormous military budgets and gutting all social spending can be countered by Jefferson's destruction of the US Army and Navy both. Understand that I am only saying the Founders were human, and that treating them as prophets and infallible does them no service.

They were plenty human enough to disregard their own principles for convenience, so simply saying "X says so" cannot work unless we're talking theology, when God is the X and not humans. As the Founders are not in fact Gods or angels....