Another interesting tidbit in this video is the teabagger split between Palinites (government should promote Christian values) and Paulites (government should go away). Either way, they’re a party of loons.
(via One Good Move)
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
It’s also interesting that neither Palin nor Paul accept evolution.
Palin couldn’t even pull red Alaskans together to vote for her team at the 2008 Republican National Convention, losing five votes to Ron Paul.
Thanks. Now can someone please tell Obama that? Hopey changey my ass.
so what if the founding fathers wanted it this way or that way?
why should people today live by the standards of more than 200 years ago?
even if for the sake of argument we agree that all the founding fathers were just older versions of jerry falwell it still has no relevance for our lives today.
It’s also a huge FAIL that the party of evolution deniers has been, at least in a rhetorical sense, pinching loaves into their hands and throwing them at their fellow citizens for well over a year now.
Falafel: Maybe you’re right. Maybe we should become an officially Christian nation. That way, we could end up like the UK: almost entirely secular, where barely anyone “Christian” actually takes religion seriously.
It suddenly struck me that perhaps the reason for the Hitler images on their anti-Obama posters is not that they think that Obama is another Hitler, but because they’re trying to channel Hitler’s ghost into 21st century America. Time to go put an images of Darwin and Ernst Mayr on my minivan to counter their efforts…
Unless, of course, you write a jokey memo/e-mail suggesting things the head of a child-rape mafia might do on an Official State Visit™; or Made the mistake of being one of the nitwits in line for a bauble and want to join that same child-rape mafia.
Great video. But I wonder if it will affect Olbermann’s ratings in a negative way; Thomas Jefferson’s views on Christian orthodoxy are not exactly flattering.
I never really thought of the Palinites being against Democracy (big D). I always thought they were just agin book larnin’. Interesting point.
fun Jefferson
Politico covered this disconnect between Paulites and Palinites: http://j.mp/93vo7I
Unfortunately, it’s unlikely to split the Republican vote in any meaningful way, since both camps are united in their opposition to and hatred of Obama.
“Palin wants the country to return to the way it was in 1775”
A loyal colony of Britain?
Kathy Orlinsky | April 25, 2010 10:25 AM:
Same thing, functionally. The voting population must be able to make good decisions. This requires knowledge and understanding – education. Without good education, and widespread desire to understand the issues, the voting population becomes and easily misled mob. A mob which will eagerly, but unknowingly, aid and abet the replacement of democracy with a different form of government.
Can we please be done with the myth that “what the founding fathers wanted” is of any relevance in modern politics? God forbid we would actually talk about the merits of any given proposal, we have to invoke the wishes of dead men in order to make any kind of good decision. Clearly.
This is one of the reasons why Canadians are fucking terrified of the goings-on in your country. A sizable chunk of your population is so stupid that this is what they want.
Carlie #3, it gets even worse: Obama meeting Billy Graham today. It’s the Rick Warren affair all over again.
Unrelated, but why is there a banner ad for Glenn Beck’s book-on-tape at the top of the screen? That’s some great targeted advertising right there.
The role of god in the formation of the USA and its laws was somewhere between negligible and zero.
Most of the edicts and rules in the OT are illegal under US law. You can no long sell your kids as sex slaves, stone people to death for working on the Sabbath, beat your slaves, or torch witches, wizards, and heretics. Wearing cloth made of two different fibers is legal as is eating pork and shellfish.
It is not illegal to covet your neighbors ass although you can’t steal it. Besides which, no one in the neighborhood has any donkeys.
@#15. It is of great relevance since the founders implemented enlightenment principles in the constitution. Those principles are as relevant today as they were then and they are what save us from becoming a theocracy – Christian style, naturally. Those principles are also hanging by a thread because of these intellectual gangsters like Palin, Beck ,etc, etc, etc, …. Palin and the rest are good at one thing: psychology. They lave learned that if you say something often enough, no matter the depths of the stupidity, or whether it is easily refuted by a quick read, more people – voters – will start to believe it. Then, we’ll have an even more serious problem come next election and the concern of our Canadian friend at #16 will be well-founded.
There’s two major religions at play here, Christianity and ancestor worship of the Founding Fathers. When these come into conflict, it is generally acceptable for good Americans to choose either, as long as they choose one.
Olbermann should be fine. (Disclaimer: I speak as a deacon of the cult of Jefferson.)
Unfortunately, the right would just love to edit Jefferson out of the history of the US–along with Franklin and probably about 50% of the founding Fathers–including the clergy who spoke out in favor of separation of church and state. I learned on Glenn Beck the other day that Hoover, Coolidge, Harding and Roosevelt were all radicals who caused the Great Depression. Who would have thought that stupid could be so mortally dangerous to democracy? Well, the founding fathers, among others. Franklin posited that the constitution had bought America perhaps a century of democratic freedom before his progeny became so lazy and corrupt as to be incapable of self rule. Turns out he was of by about a factor of 2. I date it from the day the American Poeple elected Ronald Reagan.
I collect tweets to publish on my humor blog, and sadly there is a great deal of teabagger/christian right loonies who not only believe America is a Christian nation, but truly do believe the founding fathers meant for it to be.
It’s sad most of them can’t name more than two of the founding fathers though.
The founding fathers were familiar with history and knew the Catholic Church had become bloated, corrupt, and more interested in power than serving god. The Protestant Reformation hadn’t really improved things, since the Church of England and other national protestant churches had also become bloated, corrupt, and more interested in power than god. They saw how divisive religion was, causing decades of war with the horror of the Thirty Years Was as a grand finale.
The founding fathers agreed that combining religion and government worked to the degradation of both. The founding fathers considered religion to be a matter of individual conscience and government had no business involving itself in religion. Furthermore most of them did not want religion to be involved in government. The Wall of Separation was not a purely Jeffersonian idea.
There’s the further point that many of the founding fathers were deists. They were culturally Christians but not even nominally Christians. They didn’t belong to any organized religion and went to church solely for weddings and funerals.
The idea that the founding fathers wanted the US to be a Christian country is based on wishful thinking by a small but vocal group of fundamentalist Christians. It’s just one step in turning the country into a theocracy.
My father, who is quite liberal but has a shitty sense of humor, dragged Mom (who went willingly) and me (who went unwillingly) to a show by – stop me if you’ve heard of these yokels – Bill Engvall, Jeff Foxworthy, and Larry the Cable Guy.
Bill Engvall, while he is probably just as much of a yuck as the other two in a lot of ways, was the only one who had maybe an ounce of class. The other two? Bleah.
I mention this, though, because you should have seen the AUDIENCE. Almost entirely white (I saw one black guy and two Hispanic people) and I’m sure my parents and I were the only liberals in the audience. You should have seen all the homozygous recessive loci floating around, too.
I seriously thought that if I said what I wanted to say, I was going to get lynched.
What Would
JesusJefferson Do@#21 There is no “ancestor worship” involved – why did you put it in such a condescending way? No one “worships” Darwin either. Those men deserve to be respected/remembered for what they did and I hadn’t seen that put into religious terms, until thou.
Despite being a Brit, I once agaian feel intensely glad that Palin never got her designer shoe into the door of the White House. Stupidity like her’s should carry a public health warning.
Rutee, Shrieking Harpy of Dooooom @ 13;
I am sure that Gordon Brown (or David Cameron or Nick Clegg, which ever one wins the forthcoming election) would be more than happy to take over the administration of the US.
Ruthlessly pillaging the continental United States might just generate enough revenue to offset our enormous national debt, and it would not be the first time we have done it…
;-)
One of the reasons why Americans are so protective of the constitution and the founding fathers is real simple. They were total radicals of the time and created a document and government that we couldn’t get ratified today.
All that stands between us and fascism or christofascist theocracy is a piece of paper, some judges, and tradition.
Freedom of speech? Freedom of religion? Right to own guns? Right of privacy? Equal rights for all people including women and pigmented people? Free and fair elections? Free and open legal trials. Due process. Habeus Corpus. There are huge numbers of people in the USA that hate some or all of that and would love to scrap the constitution.
Currently the perverted xian fundie cults are the leading enemies of secular democracy. Or just look at how Moron Bush mangled the constitution. IIRC, at one time anyone could be designated an “Enemy Combatant” and held without trial or proof indefinity. We all know that sooner or later an enemy combatant would come down to whoever they government doesn’t like. It could be PZ Myers, people you don’t like, or you. As Bush pointed out once, the constitution is just a goddamned piece of paper.
Revering the constitution and the founding fathers isn’t idolatry or ancestor worship. It is a desperate hope against the constant forces and groups that find democracy and freedom inconvenient for their agendas.
I am half serious, riffing on an observations that some non-US Pharyngulites have made about our treatment of the Founders in modern political discussions.
Unlike Darwin and evolutionary biology, there are some propositions which can be taken seriously in modern US discourse solely on the basis that a Founder once said something similar.
I’m not really complaining about this, as I share so many of their viewpoints, and I have relied on such weak arguments as “well, Jefferson said,” when I am talking to people on the street and know that I have less than 60 seconds to make my case.
But look what we’re doing right now, discussing what they believed regarding church and state in the context of modern politics, as though it should matter to anyone besides historians, instead of simply discussing whether policy X is a good idea or not.
I don’t see the characterization of ancestor worship as condescending, though. I think it’s no great distortion, not unfair, and I plan to make burnt offerings to TJ later this afternoon.
@DaveWTC It seems that there is certainly an element of ‘ancestor worship’ or at least an idealization of an age which is filtered by one’s own conceptions in a lot of the individuals who self-identify as ‘Palinites’ (there is clearly a TON of revisionism going on…) or ‘Paulites’. I think it’s unfortunate, however, that much of the wisdom of the founding fathers is discounted on account of their fan clubs.
Ron Paul in particular often makes some very apropos observations about a lot of relevant political issues, but in this case too, there is certainly a tendency to idealize the Constitution and often to emphasize the Un-Constitutionality of certain policies rather than to analyze the issues and to simply demonstrate why such policies would not be good on a practical level without focusing on the inviolability of a political document that (for better or worse) most individuals are relatively ignorant about. And of course, being a fundamentalist Christian who doesn’t believe in evolution doesn’t exactly help advance his cause… ;) Unfortunately it seems the baby has been thrown out with the bath water…
“What Would JesusJefferson Do”
Get drunk and bang a slave?
Well, the question of unconstitutionality is of real importance to these discussions, since it on that question that the Supreme Court must decide the legality of a policy.
When a bad idea also happens to be unconstitutional, it’s useful to highlight the unconstitutionality as a practical barrier to implementation, since passing constitutional amendments is an incredible pain in the ass.
Gregory Greenwood #29
Unfortunately if you take over the US then you inherit the American national debt. The UK national debt is puny compared to the US version.
In the spirit of the Flower Revolutions in Europe, I like the idea of coopting the sunflower for the use of us rational scientific people.
The sunflower is a shining example of modern evolution; it is a hybrid of two other species which has reproductively isolated itself because it cannot reproduce with the other species.
Helianthus anomalus is the specific species.
Confucianism?
@Rutee #13
‘Tis Himself @ 35;
This would be a problem if we were seeking to responsibly run the new terroritory but, in the great tradition of British colonialism, it would be far simpler to asset strip America of all that is of value in terms of natural resources, agricultural produce, art and such like and then simply say that America’s debt is her own problem, and should be fixed by Americans, and so ramp up taxation to ruinous levels in order to offset the debts.
Or we could simply threaten any debtors who get too uppity with our huge, new-found nuclear arsenal (given Palin’s prior prenouncements, I am sure she would agree whole heartedly with that last policy).
I never said that we would rule responsibly or even sanely, after all. :-p
@ AlexP #16 Unfortunately, there is a group of people who want the same thing here. And they have influence in the PMO.
Palinites and Paulites. Hahahahah. Like there are major differences?
I don’t know how real the parallels are, given my tragically ill-informed understanding of Confucianism. Our bureaucrats are deliberately indoctrinated through Burke or Rawls to defend the inherent mandate of a “just ruler” (who exhibits 仁?) though.
My understanding is that the difference between Palinites and Paulites is that of civil liberties. While both would love to drastically cut many large government-run projects like federal welfare, Palinites would also prefer government intervention to enforce traditional Judeo-Christian values such as keeping Christ in Squidmas and making it progressively difficult (possibly going as far as to criminalize) obtaining any and all forms of birth control. Paulites are more or less in favor of barring the government from legislating on personal morality, even going as far as suggesting the cessation of the War on Drugs in the case of Ron Paul himself. Personally, I see the Paulites as the lesser of two evils.
I think it was supposed to be confusionism…
This one is not a good example of their differences. Ron Paul is also opposed to legal abortion and contraception — he has sought to overturn not only Roe but also Griswold; see section 3.1.B of his “We The People Act” — and women’s reproductive rights are generally absent from Ron Paul fansites.
It’s no accident that although the Declaration of Independence mentions a Creator (it’s a Revolutionary document, much as Revelations is Revolutionary) there is no mention of a Creator or God (or whatever) in the Constitution. It’s OK (and effective) to use religion to “rile” the population, but the very structure of the gov’t must not hinge on religion in any way.
some how I doubt that the Tea Party loonies have the same idea of who the founding fathers were as has been used previously. I suspect that they do not mean the signatories of the Constitution and The Declaration Of Independence. I think that they mean those colonist who they think shared their beliefs something like “Our Pilgrim Fathers”
Still it has very little connection to reality.
maybe someone like William Jennings Bryant would be more appealing though not a “Founding Father” as some one that they would respect and agree with.
heaven forbid that we should rely on our own reason and the will people to order our lives
Tis himself:
You forget that we are going to do what our leaders did in 1776 – We’d ask ‘what would King George and the Prime Minister Lord North do’? Why, get you ‘mercans working and paying taxes, and working off your own debt. You owe it, you pay it. Yes sirree, we’d have the resources, and you the debt. Sounds fair to me. Revenge for Disney World and McDonalds at last. The oil would last us centuries – sod the (your) environment.
Thomas Jefferson Was One of The Most Intelligent People Ever!
Sorry, Katherine, but I beg to disagree with your assessment. There are parts of that show I really love, though it is true that the humor is quite childish in places. Nothing wrong with being childish. Hell, I think Ron White’s “I got thrown out of a bar in New York City” is hilarious (especially the reason he got thrown out). Foxworthy makes fun of the stereotyped redneck and yet the people you were sneering at think he’s funny.
But aside from the show itself, I am disturbed by your assumption that all those white people were conservative. I doubt it. Many white people are not. I am not, and believe me, I am very white, and I live further south than most of the US (except Texas south of San Antonio and the Florida peninsula). There are a lot of white people like me. Not the majority, true, but a lot. And some of them were probably in that audience.
@#31, #32. But isn’t “what they believed regarding church and state” embodied by the constitution and, therefore, highly relevant even today? For a recent example: National Day of Prayer – aren’t we glad of the establishment clause (largely Founder Madison; curiously a basic enlightenment principle but somewhat of an afterthought, except for the brief mention of religious test for employment, oh well, and not so curiously ignored by the likes of Bush but, now even Obama, the “constitutional lawyer”!)? The christians are left with their unsupportable contention that this was intended to be a christian nation. Who wins? We do! (Should.) I agree completely, though, that what one founder thought is not the last word on anything, otherwise, we might still have slavery. If there is a constitutional principle involved in Policy X, then there will be an immediate focus there and rightly so; if not, we all expect that a certain ilk will quote whatever/whomever they want to support their case, even out-of-context; those who try to pull that kind of stunt – the Palins, Bushes, whoever – are disingenuous dickheads and I agree that this cheapens what the founders said. If Policy X seems a good policy, on its own merits, for practical reasons, and it violates the constitution, there is a remedy in the form of amendment. For example, how about Prohibition? (Hmmm. Oops!) I do see your point, I just think it was a bit over the top, thanks. I also liked what raven wrote at #30. BTW, regarding #32’s comment “a political document that (for better or worse) most individuals are relatively ignorant about”, I am a naturalized US citizen and I, while obviously no genius when it comes to the US constitution or anything else for that matter, am constantly astonished by the ignorance of many of those who took the courageous and perilous step of being born here to become a citizen!
Why do cable pundits feel they need funny voices.
otrame, the vast majority of the audience was cheering when Larry the Cable Guy said ‘Ah believe the best thing about Cash for Clunkers was that a lot of Obama bumper stickers disappeared from the road’.
Tell me that’s a mostly-liberal audience and I have a bridge to sell you!
By rejecting King George III, God — the judeo-christian one– was also implicitly rejected. (See divine right.) Also, nowhere in the Constitution says that Congress has to establish a state-run church.
Regarding the audience, I’m sure there were probably some more liberals in the crowd, but it was apparently majority-weird.
Thinking about it again, you know, none of them really had much of any class, though I suppose Larry the Cable Guy’s attitude is somewhat affected since it’s, well, a character.
The problem with asking what they believed is that they believed very different things about how the words should be interpreted. To paraphrase a comrade of mine, the Constitution appears to be deliberately vague in parts, as a means of getting votes to ratify a document which might not have been ratified if it were more specific. The Establishment Clause, for example, meant something very different to Washington and Adams than it did to Madison and Jefferson.
As a matter of historical interest, Washington and Adams’ is a viable interpretation of the words. Unfortunately, if relying on them, judge Barbara Crabb would have to come to the opposite conclusion: the National Day of Prayer is perfectly constitutional.
Instead of relying on any Founders’ intentions, we can ask “what does the statement ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion’ mean,” and relate our interpretation to the context of modern society. We may come to a similar interpretation as Jefferson may have, but we have not relied on Jefferson’s views, convenient since relying on him would also legitimate a reliance on Washington’s views.
There are of course difficulties with my argument here. One is that some of the meanings of words have changed in the last 230 years. “Militia” is famously one of those quickly shifting words, such that today, the Second Amendment does not have a perfectly clear and obvious meaning. Well, it’s clear and obvious enough to me, but I seem to be surrounded by obfuscators. ;) In such cases, investigating what that word meant can be instructive, as the Court did in Heller. But once the 18th century meanings of words are made clear, it’s the 21st century application of those words to our society which is important.
Well, you’re right about that. My choice of “ancestor worship” was deliberate hyperbole. A bit of joke, perhaps a bit of insight, and probably a bit of fail.
I’m grateful that you take the Constitution seriously, DaveWTC, and people like you are a welcome addition to this country.
Well, my fantasies now include his head on a spit. It wasn’t enough that the jackass is either a knowledgeable liar or a lucky moron, but he has to rail on and on about how little government should interfere, and he carves a special exception out for Abortion?
Government shouldn’t interfere with people’s personal lives.
Women aren’t people.
See, perfectly consistent.
@28
In a very real sense what is going on is very much ancestor worship. Your failure to recognize it doesn’t make it less real.
@30
Unfortunately Raven, RESPECTING the founding fathers is perfectly acceptable but revering, idolizing, and worshiping them is not and what is going on is far to close to worshipful idolatry for comfort.
The whole ‘original intent’ concept is also too close to fundamentalism for comfort but as Raven also said it would be impossible to get the constitution written today in the rights-protecting-form the original has.
Atleast one conservative is beginning to see the light that the book’larnin hatred the Palintypes have is a dangerous thing.
Jonathan Gurwitz on editing Jefferson out of the curriculum.
Quite often what’s meant by “original intent” is “this is how I interpret the Constitution and I’m sure the founding fathers would agree with me.” Since the founding fathers are all dead, they can hardly object.
The founding fathers were a contentious lot who hardly agreed on any one thing. Every sentence, sometimes every word, in the Constitution and Bill of Rights were compromises. Few agreed wholeheartedly with any particular part. Thus looking to the founding fathers for original intent is silly. It varies amongst them. Not to mention that original intent is just as open to interpretation as the Constitution itself because while there’s lots of explicit data, they’re from many contradictory sources.
In a similar way, “activist judges” usually means “some judge made a decision I don’t like.”
I got back from a long weekend in Pittsburgh* to find a thread about stupid tea partiers and I can’t help but wonder: Where are all of the St. Ron Paul libtard trolls? I feel like I need to take this past weekend’s frustrations out on somebody.
*Who the hell voluntarily goes to Pittsburgh, amiright?
Since Rutee, SHoD brought it up, I want to put forth something I was just thinking about abortion they other day. A friend and I were talking about vaccination and how it’s only because vaccination has been so successful at eradicating diseases such as small pox (completely, yay!), polio, measles, etc (from the developed world, for the most part) that people don’t have to suffer from the horrors of these diseases. So, people who have never experienced the negatives of not having vaccinations don’t have the proper perspective and end up only seeing the negatives of the vaccines themselves. Is something similar going on with abortion? Since women in the USA don’t have to get back alley abortions and death from abortion has become very rare, people only think about the poor little fetuses. They don’t think about the women who died before Roe and don’t consider the women who will die if Roe is overturned. Even though many of my relatives are conservatives, a lot of the older ones are pro-choice because they knew women who died getting illegal abortions. The same relatives are also very pro-vaccine because they actually remember polio outbreaks.
#47 costanza
The DoI was essentially an open letter to the world, declaring the intention of the American colonies to secede and their reasons why. Every civilized country at that time was ruled by an elite who claimed a Divine Right to rule. The DoI was an unambiguous statement that each man’s right to rule himself trumped the Divine Right of Kings. Creator is purposely ambiguous – it could be Zeus, Jehovah, the Force or nature (evolution).
What is more notable, is that there is NO OTHER mention of divinity in either the DoI or the Constitution in a time when it was normal for government documents to include “in the name of God” and variations thereof.
Hypatia’s Daughter @ #64:
This is exactly the point I make with people, because invariably they misquote the line in their zeal to prove their point. It’s not “they are endowed by the Creator” (suggesting total agreement on one entity) but “they are endowed by their Creator” (each person is innately endowed with the exact same rights, no matter who/what they conceive “their Creator” to be).
Daddy got airlifted out of Hungary during the Russian invasion of 1956, sponsored by a nice Scottish Presbyterian church in Pittsburgh. He always insisted (with a straight face) that the girls at the American relief office, who he remembered were associated with the Pittsburgh church, were prettier than the girls from Munich at the German one. He met my mom in Pittsburgh, where her folks immigrated because they were Russian-Jewish popular songwriters (yeah, I can’t put two and two together and get four any way I slice it, either). I’m aware your question was rhetorical, but it was one I’ve often asked, myself.
Sorry, unable to properly use blockquote, lose ten points.
chgo_liz,
I’d never thought about the phrasing of “endowed by their Creator” before. That’s an excellent point of attack to use against the theocratists.
This myth will enver go away, so long as it is useful to people who want a Christian nation. It is naive to expect people to bend to facts when their myths serve their aims better. It’s almost impossible to crack that kind of ideology. These people correctly see themselves as being under assault by the “elites” (read: fact-based community). They will never surrender. Our only hope is to discredit them in the eyes of their children. Cruel, and not something you could campaign on, but necessary.
Also, read this interesting article: http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/04/25/the-year-of-our-lord-christian-phrase-still-used-on-state-docum/
That might be a very personal thing for them both as they themselves have not really evolved much from being intellectual amoebas.
Intellectual yeast, please.
ROTFLMAO! “Tear down this wall” :-D :-D :-D
I will :-)
I flirted with libertarianism once – got my face slapped.