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Early Sunday Morning Loyalty Bashing | 8 comments (8 topical, editorial, 0 hidden)

Re: Early Sunday Morning Loyalty Bashing (none / 0)

My loyalty is to the ideas of the Founding Fathers, not to the ideas of Alberto Gonzales:

when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

by BooMan on Sun Mar 26th, 2006 at 08:54:59 AM EST

Re: Early Sunday Morning Loyalty Bashing (none / 0)

My loyalty used to be oriented similarly, before I decided that I shouldn't gloss over the fact that the Founding Fathers didn't include folks like women and blacks in their idea of Constitutional rights. Those exclusions formed a new basis for old injustices and inequalities that are tragically still very powerful in modern society, and the Fathers bear some responsibility for that. Ultimately I decided that having loyalty to their ideas was sort-of quaint and unjust, and not really effective for my own value system since no matter how much I might like a person's other ideas, I just can't make exceptions for things like considering other human beings to be property.

So after a lot of careful thought about it, now my loyalty is to the idea of freedom itself rather than to someone else's limited ideas about freedom; my loyalty is tied to concepts like equality (and others) very directly, no middleman involved. My loyalty is not to my government or to its history, but I am dedicated and loyal to the notion that every citizen having a voice in their govt is a better system than those in which citizens don't have a voice. This arrangement of loyalty has the added benefit of allowing me a vast array of allegiances without betraying my loyalties.

by IndyLib on Sun Mar 26th, 2006 at 10:07:27 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Early Sunday Morning Loyalty Bashing (none / 0)

I don't blame the founding fathers for failing to give the franchise to women and blacks. What they did was truly revolutionary at the time. The price for getting the constitution ratified (especially the part that allowed for two Senators from every state) was to allow the South to pad their census statistics by adding slaves to the count. This gave them more representation in the House.

They either cut that deal, or we would have been stuck with the Articles of Confederation, which clearly were not sufficient to hold the country together. The fact that they didn't count a slave as equal to a whole human being is just part of the bargaining that took place to pass the constitution.

Given that we only banned Jim Crow laws forty years ago, I have a hard time getting indignant with the Founding Fathers for their odious construction.

The ideals laid out in the Declaration and Constitution ultimately proved deadly to the institution of slavery and led directly to women getting the vote.

My loyalty is to the ideals they laid out of limited government, seperation of powers, secular government, and an ever windening sphere of freedom and opportunity.

The fact that the Republic did not grant these things from its inception is made up for by the fact that the principles of the Revolution held the seeds for them to blossom in the future.

But, there are always reactionary forces that are hostile to liberty. Today we are in a crisis.

by BooMan on Sun Mar 26th, 2006 at 11:05:59 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Early Sunday Morning Loyalty Bashing (none / 0)

Yeah, I had suspected this would be where you and me would have to split the sheets in terms of political theory.

In my view, there's never an acceptable excuse to turn entire classes of people into property for use by the State and the citizens it deems non-property, and it really doesn't matter how many white guys are inconvenienced by that. It can't be justified. It can't be rationalized. It was not only wrong, it was actually also a bad move tactically, since 20-20 hindsight affords us clear proof that societies with greater social equality have massive advantages over societies with less, and that ideas about social equality can be radically changed in a single generation.

I'm not "indignant" with the FFs, btw; I just think they weren't right about everything and that they had a few really fucked up ideas. I don't criminalize them, but I don't idolize them either. I respect some of what they did and think it should be emulated; I reject other things they did and think we should pay better attention such that we don't make what amount to the same damn mistakes all over again. Panicking because we're in a crisis just leads to more bad choices.

You & I do share ideals to an extent, but it does seem to me that you often misread where I'm coming from, and I'm not sure why. I wonder if you have some inaccurate ideas about "what feminists think" or "how feminists are" that cause you to read what I'm saying to you through a lens that doesn't really apply to me? (I realize that you can't answer this question since if the answer is "yes" you wouldn't know it, so I don't expect you to answer it, it's just a muse.)

by IndyLib on Sun Mar 26th, 2006 at 11:35:23 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Early Sunday Morning Loyalty Bashing (none / 0)

I doubt I am misreading you because of some preconception I have. I know you don't consider yourself a Democrat, but that is the only preconception I have.

In this case, I am not disagreeing with you, but just stating my point of view.

People talk about the three-fifths compromise as if it were intended to diminish blacks and call them less than fully human.

But that was not the intent at all. No one seriously considered giving slaves the vote, but they were granted representation in a sense. At least in broad terms, the interests of the states in which they resided were given extra representation. That was a concession to appease opposition tothe two senator rule. Little states like Delaware and Rhode Island were felt to have too much power in the Senate.

In other words, the northern founding fathers, and even some of slave holders like Jefferson, may have wanted to abolish slavery, but they had no way of doing that while forging a nation out of rival states.

Far more important, and feasible, was their accomplishment of outlawing the religious test, so that Virginia and Massachusetts and Pennsylvania could join in a united government, despite their differing dominant sects.

They gave us the first fruits of liberty and a strong enough system to survive civil war, and over two hundred years of strife.

I am eternally grateful.

by BooMan on Sun Mar 26th, 2006 at 12:11:03 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Early Sunday Morning Loyalty Bashing | 8 comments (8 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

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