Mr. Shaman
Senior Member
- May 4, 2010
- 23,892
- 822
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Oh, the irony....how Tea Partiers insist their religion is New Testament....but, when it comes to politics, their preference is "Old Testament" Constitution, all-the-way.
"The Tea Partiers belong to a different traditiona tradition of divisive fundamentalism. Like other fundamentalists, they seek refuge from the complexity and confusion of modern life in the comforting embrace of an authoritarian scripture and the imagined past it supposedly represents. Like other fundamentalists, they see in their good book only what they want to see: confirmation of their preexisting beliefs. Like other fundamentalists, they dont sweat the details, and they ignore all ambiguities. And like other fundamentalists, they make enemies or evildoers of those who disagree with their doctrine.
The Tea Partiers are right to revere the Constitution. Its a remarkable, even miraculous document. But there are many Constitutions: the Constitution of 1789, of 1864, of 1925, of 1936, of 1970, of today. Where ODonnell & Co. go wrong is in insisting that their imagined, idealized document is the countrys one true Constitution, and that dissenters are somehow un-American. By putting the Constitution front and center, the Tea Party has reinvigorated a long-simmering argument over who we are and who we want to be. Thats great. But to truly honor the Founders spirit, they have to make room for actual debate. As usual, Thomas Jefferson put it best. In a letter to a friend in 1816, he mocked men [who] look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be touched; who ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment.
Let us follow no such examples, nor weakly believe that one generation is not as capable as another of taking care of itself, and of ordering its own affairs, he concluded. Each generation is as independent as the one preceding, as that was of all which had gone before.
Face facts, Tea Partiers.....your Founders were The Puritans.
The Founding Fathers, of the 1700s, REJECTED your sense of Divine Rights. You are the fossils of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
The Founding Fathers, of the 1700s, REJECTED your sense of Divine Rights. You are the fossils of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.