A fellow blogger who goes by the handle of Capt. Fogg inspired what began as a comment on his post, Masters of Mendacity, but grew into a post of my own. The Captain's post adroitly dissects the fallacies at the heart of the ongoing proclamations by Palin, O'Donnell, and Beck that feed the clamor from the Tea Party of, "We want our country back." The basic reasoning appears to follow the lines of, "America is a Christian nation, founded by God or at the very least endorsed by God and it (America) must be saved from liberals." One of Palin's latest proclamations is that that the Constitution tells us that our "Unalienable rights" come from God. Christine O'Donnell has declared that the Constitution isn't merely a legal document but a covenant based on divine principles. Glenn Beck appears to have anointed the Constitution to be his Gospel, and himself as the Second Coming.
They aren't just liars, they are flat out wrong. There is no mention of God or unalienable rights in the Constitution; perhaps Palin, et.al. have confused the Constitution with the Declaration of Independence. That document states, "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. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
What fascinates me about the language regarding unalienable rights is that Jefferson's concerns weren't about worshipping a particular God but about declaring that there were rights inherent to being human that could not be usurped and that the purpose of government was to protect those rights as opposed to curtailing them or taking them away. I think that his use of the term Creator reflected the broader concept that such rights were natural rights, innate rights that were not given but existed without being conferred or bestowed by any government.
Beck, Palin etc. have chosen to harp on this language as proof that this is a Christian nation. Based on the varied writings of Jefferson, Madison and others, I'm of the opinon that the furtherest thing from their intent was founding a Christian nation. I think that a modern debate on this matter fails to understand the worldview of the founders. These men were readers of Locke, Rousseau,Hobbes, and Aristotle. They struggled with the philosophical concepts of who are we and what is our purpose, not some fight over whose God was better. They actually thought about the purpose of government and concluded that it was to serve the people and that the power of the government came from the consent given by the governed.
It was a revolutionary idea, Certainly the English Monarchy didn't recognize its power as coming from the people but viewed its power as God given and superior to the will of the people. The Declaration took that philosophy on with its bold proclamation about unalienable rights endowed by the Creator. It was an assertion against the then ruling idea that the government decided which rights to grant the people and which ones to deny them. It wasn't a proclamation supporting Christianity but a declaration against tyranny.
As for attributing such language to the Constitution, it just raffirms my belief that most of the people shouting about the Constitution as being a covenant based on divine principles have never read the document with even a modicum of comprehension. The Constitution is a secular document that establishes the practices and laws governing the operation of the government. The Preamble states the purpose of the Constitution clearly and succinctly: We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. (There are many sites on the Net with info on the Preamble and the rest of the Constitution. I cited to Wikipedia here because it was the best of about a dozen sites that I checked. Up to date, and fully documented.)
Citing the United States Constitution as a religious text makes about as much sense as declaring that my telephone book contains the secrets of the universe.
Love that closing line!
ReplyDeleteI don't know if we ever get fence-sitters or Undecideds amongst our readers, but, if we do, the powerful one-two punch of the Capt.'s post and your own is bound to make a dent. And, if it doesn't, then it sure confirms for me that I am in the right place. Fired up, ready to go!
Sheria: Citing the United States Constitution as a religious text makes about as much sense as declaring that my telephone book contains the secrets of the universe.
ReplyDeleteI checked my local telephone book: No mention of Photons, Protons, or Electrons (but I did find a few electricians); no mention of Neutrons (but I did find a pet-neutering service); no mention of Quantum Mechanics (at least nothing under auto repair); no mention of Relativity (except for an Einstein’s Bagel shop in the area); and no mention of String Theory (unless yarn dealers are allowed). So it must be true: There are no secrets of the universe in the yellow pages unless one counts the local Holiday Inn.
Nonetheless, let me reiterate my comment left under Captain Fogg’s post:
Just as Elisabeth Kübler-Ross outlined the five stages of grief as one faces their own mortality, perhaps the collective response to the end of the American Century can be similarly described: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Right now, it seems, the masters of mendacity represent the denial and anger phase.
It is the only plausible explanation to explain these phenomena.
Octy hit it on the head...
ReplyDeleteThere are a great many Americans who were comforted with the fact that as Americans they were citizens of the most powerful, richest, and best nation on the world.
They see Europe as nothing more than a collection of castles and an odd way of living. They think everyone in China is still wearing cooley hats and harvesting rice.
Thus you can throw out all the data you want and it means nothing because of this preconceived notion they have.
So, now they find that a bunch of 'ragheads' have the most powerful military pinned down in Afghanistan...well of course the only reason that can happen is because the liberals are not giving the military what they need to win.
The financial meltdown had to be the fault of some liberal, yeah, its the liberals forcing banks to loan money to deadbeats....
They will defend and protect this preconceived concept of AMERICA in their head and they will not let anyone chip away at it...
We are the greatest, God blessed us....we are special. If you say or do anything that attacks that belief then you are a liberal or you are MSM....
I once answered someone who assured me that "God wrote the Bible" that yes, he did, but only in the same fashion and to the same extent that he wrote the phone book and that the latter was a more credible guide to objective reality.
ReplyDeleteWhen Jefferson spoke of the Creator, it was in the context of his Deist interpretation of a God which represented more of a remote principle of nature; a non-anthropomorphic entity who didn't direct the path of every particle or every life, or form intimate personal relationships with people. Newton had already shown that the universe, tiny though it seemed at the time, didn't need a force to keep it all in balance and educated people would entertain only that some entity must have set it in motion. Newton himself was of that mind.
It was a God similar to the 'good' but not directly knowable or approachable God of the Gnostic Cathars -- those poor pacifist people the Church murdered in their bonfires; down to the last crying baby, in the 14th century: and why? Because of their religious tolerance amongst other things.
It wasn't the Christian God at all, the 'framers' believe in nor did Jefferson believe in the divine nature of the teacher Jesus. He, in fact blamed Christianity and its power hungry, tyrannical priesthood for wiping out most of those teachings leaving us only with scraps and traces. Jefferson's God was essentially nature itself.For what it's worth, I believe I've read that he mocked people who saw the constitution as something handed down from Sinai.
What a tragedy that we live where things can be so successfully presented as their antagonistic opposites and used to destroy freedom in its own name. These pseudo-patriotic bastards are making a mockery of what they claim to represent.
I wrote about this around 7/4. When someone gives me this crock of nonsense I tell them to google "constitution full-text." When they find the word "God," let me know. Still waiting. The problems is, of cours, that the people who believe Beck & Co. are just as ignorant.
ReplyDeleteNance, anyone riding the fence at this point in time should end up with a royal red rash where it hurts the most.
Let me elaborate on the emotional responses to paradigm shift. When collective psychology enters the picture, there are other telltale symptoms to be considered: Nostalgia, rightwing nationalism and populist movements, and the return of anti-communist paranoia. In a nutshell:
ReplyDeleteNostalgia – the “old melancholy” longed for a return to the seemingly innocent times of the Donna Reed Show, and the age of Marx and Coca Cola before the fall of the Berlin Wall; but the “new melancholy” of libertarians and far right-wingers goes further back … to the 1870s and 1880s - long before there were income taxes, social security, Medicare, civil rights, regulatory agencies, and other trappings of liberal progressive accomplishment.
Nostalgia gives rise to mythologizing. Consider how the wingnuttery has raised Ronald Reagan to hero-worship status by attributing Bunyan-like feats of accomplishment to a less than mediocre president. How, for instance, Reagan single-handedly bankrupted communism (the oft mentioned bogus claim, although Reagan certainly laid the foundation for bankrupting capitalism). Consider the tenacious grip of Reaganomics in the minds of bumpkins … despite all evidence that such policies in fact had disastrous consequences.
Turning secular documents such the Constitution into the word of god? Why should this surprise us. It is not the mythologizing of these documents that they seek to accomplish; it is their ahistorical INTERPRETATION of these documents that they seek mythologize. After all, who can argue against the word of god!
Nationalism and wingnut populism - Need we say more about the sham of wedge politics, fear mongering, homophobia, Islamophobia, disguised racism, anti-immigration rhetoric, and all attempts to demonize liberals and progressives as the anti-Christ.
The return of anti-communist paranoia – should it surprise us that a centrist such as President Obama is termed a “socialist-commie-pinko” of suspicious origin – the veritable Manchurian candidate of liberal-progressive apostasy! Linguistic revisionism has the same function as mythologizing. By invoking the specter of past demons, you can make any duck walk and talk like a communist if you repeat the meme often enough.
It is not enough to rail against barbarians at the gate. If we ignore the meaning of these signs and symptoms, and their corresponding linguistic framing devices, we do so at our peril.
Absolutely right. The Dominionists like to try and rewrite history, and even turn it into law. A child of the Enlightenment like Jefferson had no interest in having The Church run the government, and even Ben Franklin was quoted as saying "Lighthouses are more helpful than churches."
ReplyDeleteBut can you get some of these people to believe these things? Reality isn't something they necessarily approve of.
Stimmt so, Herr Krake -- and one can't help, or anyway I can't help but compare the German retreat into the nostalgia of confected mythology and the pretended pure ethnicity of a past that was free of things like the treaty of Versailles, inflation and Jews. A time of heroes.
ReplyDeleteOf things like linguistic framing devices however, we're not ourselves completely free. Such causes as I deem to be worthy: feminism, humanism and others make much use of linguistic revisionism and when they do, the right wingers suddenly become less tone deaf and make a big deal of it.
Perhaps we ought to consider putting up storm shutters on our glass house?
Anyway, some great comments here.