Tag Archives: Slavery

May 7, 2013 · 5:03 AM

The Greatest Failure Conservatives Make When it Comes to our Constitution

constitution

Forward Progressives

Perspective—it’s something I always encourage people to use.  Unfortunately many people are reluctant, or incapable, of doing so.

This is especially true when it comes to our Constitution.  How dare anyone say an unkind word about the “infallible Constitution.”

But let’s take a look at just a little bit of what the original interpretation of our Constitution allowed.

Our Constitution, when it was written, allowed for very young women (13-14 in many cases) to be married off by families in arranged marriages to much older men.  Well it didn’t “allow” for it as much as it didn’t prevent it from happening.

This probably had to do with the fact that the average life expectancy in the late-1700′s was around 35 years of age.  Probably another reason why our right to health care wasn’t that big of a deal back then.

However, now days if a 13 year old girl was married off to a 30 year old man we would call that child trafficking, statutory rape, child molestation—or all three.  The man would be labeled as a sex offender, then be required to register as one for the rest of his life.  By the rest of his life I mean as soon as he was freed after serving a very lengthy prison sentence.

Then we have the almighty Second Amendment and the words “shall not be infringed.”  Many believe this amendment is one of the foundations of our rights as Americans.  It’s meant to empower people against a tyrannical government.  When people use this argument, based upon words written over 200 years ago (during a time very different from our own), they completely ignore the glaring fact that our society has changed drastically.

The Second Amendment was written during a time where militias were our primary means of defense against enemies, Native American conflict was frequent and “going out to dinner” meant a family hunting trip in the woods.

Oh, and when guns were single-shot muskets.  (Ed. Emphasis are mine)

Do you really think that if the Founding Fathers knew what our society would become, and what weapons would evolve into, they would have been so general with the wording of our Second Amendment?  After all, couldn’t some argue that “right to bear arms” means all arms?  Things like plastic explosives or military style rocket launchers and missiles.  I mean, if weapons are meant to “keep our government fearful of its citizens,” why is it that the federal government gets to have all of the really kick-ass weapons?

Shouldn’t we, as American citizens who celebrate our Second Amendment, be allowed to own F-22 Raptors loaded to capacity with however many missiles or bombs it can carry?  What could possibly go wrong with selling RPG’s at Walmart—without a background check?

Just imagine if someone could travel back in time and tell a father in 1780, “No, you cannot marry off your daughter to that much older man, that’s illegal.  Oh, and so is owning slaves.”  That father would have scoffed at your attempt to “infringe upon his rights as an American” and you would be deemed unconstitutional by many—if you were lucky enough not to be shot, or hung as “treasonous” for even suggesting something so preposterous.

Yet, in 2013, if someone advocated for the rights of families to sell off their young daughters to older men and for people to be allowed to own slaves, sane people would call them disgusting monsters.

Perspective is not a dirty word.  In fact, it should always be used when referencing the “core of our Constitution” (something written over 200 years ago) and how it translates into a modern society. Refusing to acknowledge proper perspective is the greatest failure conservatives make when discussing our Constitution, and how it should be applied today.

Because I hate to break it to conservatives, but progressive liberal ideas are an American tradition.  They’re what freed the slaves, gave women the right to vote, ended child labor, created Social Security and Medicare, built public schools and our Interstate Highways, integrated schools, brought groundbreaking technologies, discovered life changing health advancements and pushed our country forward.

Those were all done by “radical liberals” bucking tradition, not conservative Americans sticking to it.

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January 6, 2013 · 4:14 AM

Welcome to the new Civil War

Welcome to the new Civil War

In a recent discussion with a friend, I mentioned how news pundits constantly use the phrase: “Our country has not been so ideologically divided since the Civil War.”

My friend’s question was “why the Civil War analogy…?  The following piece tends to address this question.

Salon

Lincoln’s unfinished war rages on, as the neo-Confederacy tries to turn back the clock on women, gays, God and guns

On a repeat viewing of Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” over the New Year’s holiday, a scene I had barely noticed the first time jumped out at me. Confederate vice-president Alexander Stephens (played with reptilian gentility by Jackie Earle Haley), in a secret meeting aboard a steamboat with Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward, faces up to the reality that the era of slavery has come to an end. Ratification of the 13th Amendment, Stephens muses, will destroy the basis of the Southern economy and the South’s traditional way of life. “We won’t know ourselves anymore,” he says.

If only it had been so. What an affluent slave owner like Stephens feared most, no doubt, was the utopian vision of “radical Reconstruction” imagined by legendary abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones in the movie), in an earlier conversation with Lincoln in the White House kitchen. Stevens envisioned a future in which all the land and property of the Southern aristocracy would be dispossessed and divided among the emancipated slaves, building a new society of free soil and free labor amid the ruins of tyranny. To put it in contemporary social-studies terms, Stevens hoped that by uprooting and destroying the South’s slave economy, one could also replace its culture.

It didn’t quite work out that way. You can’t boil one of the most tumultuous periods of American history down to one paragraph, but here goes: Lincoln was assassinated by a domestic terrorist and replaced by Andrew Johnson, who was an incompetent hothead and an unapologetic racist. Within a few years the ambitious project of Reconstruction  fell victim to a sustained insurgency led by the Ku Klux Klan and similar white militia groups. By the late 1870s white supremacist “Redeemers” controlled most local and state governments in the South, and by the 1890s Southern blacks had been disenfranchised and thrust into subservience positions by Jim Crow laws that were only slightly preferable to slavery.

So even though it’s a truism of American public discourse that the Civil War never ended, it’s also literally true. We’re still reaping the whirlwind from that long-ago conflict, and now we face a new Civil War, one focused on divisive political issues of the 21st century – most notably the rights and liberties of women and LGBT people – but rooted in toxic rhetoric and ideas inherited from the 19th century.

Edit Note:  Emphasis are mine

Continue reading here…

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February 6, 2012 · 10:41 AM

Right Wing Denial and the Legacy of Slavery

Politicus USA

Slavery ended nearly 150 years ago. It’s over. Nothing left to see here. Except that it’s Black History Month, and those damnable minorities and their liberal allies keep bringing up the past, reminding everyone of that darkest blemish on American history. The only times you hear conservatives talking about it are to revise history as politicians like Ron Paul have been doing by mainstreaming the belief that the Civil War was not primarily fought over slavery. There is no acknowledgement from conservatives that slavery and its aftermath had any consequences that can be observed today. They continue to argue that everyone has an equal chance of success on an equal playing field. While a disproportionately high number of African Americans remain in deep poverty, conservatives bend over backwards to blame them for their circumstances.

With the way that generations overlap, there are living African Americans who have heard their great-grandparents tell stories of their relatives’ firsthand experiences surviving slavery. During the Great Depression, firsthand accounts by slaves were collected for those who are interested to hear them personally. What kinds of stories would be most relevant to the social circumstances of African Americans today? Certainly, there was the commonplace policy of purposely breaking up families for over 240 years. Ever since the Moynihan Report first identified the struggles of the black family, conservatives have been quick to pounce and attribute the high percentage of single parent families to their moral laxity. They are chronically unable to acknowledge that a systemic decimation of families perpetrated by white people plays a significant role in the instability of male-female relationships to this day.  We have no precedent for the recovery time required to overcome this type of assault on a fundamental societal institution.

Speaking of recovery time, it’s been approximately seven generations since formal slavery ended. But that’s not the whole story; this month on February 13th, PBS will be airing the documentary, Slavery by Another Name, based on the book by Douglas Blackmon of The Wall Street Journal. This documentary will focus on the period from 1865 to World War II when African Americans experienced neo-slavery, a time of legal discrimination, widespread and brutal violence, and rampant criminalization. For example, “black codes,” or laws that were written to arrest and confine African Americans for crimes such as “vagrancy,” resulted in forced labor camps with conditions indistinguishable from slavery. Of note, a black man could be arrested for vagrancy for not having a job in a community that refused to employ him. As Blackmon states, “African Americans know this story in their hearts…and so people come up to me and say, ‘Gosh the story that my grandmother used to tell…I never believed it because she would describe that she was still a slave in Georgia after WWII or just before, and it never made sense to me, and now it does’…These are things that connect directly to the lives of people and the shape and pattern and structure of our society today.”

Continue reading here…

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August 11, 2011 · 7:45 AM

Bachmann’s Views On Slavery Are Worse Than You Thought

The American Prospect

Months ago, there was a small controversy over Republican presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann signing a pledge put forth by social conservatives in Iowa that stated “black child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African American President.”

However well intended, many people were understandably offended by the implication that black people were better off as property. But this isn’t the first time Bachmann has put forth a perspective on slavery that is at odds with the historical record — previously she “suggested that the Founding Fathers “worked tirelessly” to end slavery, before citing John Quincy Adams as an example (he was a child at the time of America’s founding).

Ryan Lizza’s profile of Bachmann reveals that Bachmann’s odd perspective on slavery isn’t a series of gaffes, but rather “a world view.” Lizza explains that Bachmann is a believer in a kind of Christian conservative reimagining of slavery, where “many Christians opposed slavery” but owned them anyway and didn’t free them because ““it might be very difficult for a freed slave to make a living in that economy; under such circumstances setting slaves free was both inhumane and irresponsible.” How charitable of them!

Continue here…

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July 10, 2011 · 10:52 AM

The Family Leader Drops Controversial Section Concerning Slavery From ‘Marriage Vow’ Pledge

The so-called marriage pledge sponsored by a “family values” leader and already signed by Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum, claimed that a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by both mother and father than a child born during the first African American president’s election.  

The statement is absurd on its face because frequently, many slave families were separated when sold to another plantation or when a plantation was bankrupt.  The most egregious implication of the “pledge” is to suggest that African Americans were better off as property, than we are today.

The entire statement is exactly what they meant it to be, racist to the core.

Those people are bat-crap insane!

Huffington Post

The Family Leader’s “Marriage Vow” pledge asks a lot of the presidential candidates who sign it. You better not like gay people, for instance! Porn is right out, too. But seriously, this is no-brainer stuff when you’re running for the GOP nomination in 2012.

Here’s one part, though, of the pledge’s preamble, that struck me as a little odd:

Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American President.

Yeah, you know there weren’t as many American jobs going overseas in 1860. And the price of gas was something just about everyone could live with, too. Nevertheless, while I understand the point the Family Leader wants to make about marriage, it seems to be many, many bridges too far to include this passage. As Adam Serwer succinctly put it: “A good rule of thumb for empathizing with black Americans is avoiding suggestions that we were better off as property.”

I was interested in seeing who possibly would beg to differ with Serwer’s premise. But while Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum (predictably) were quick to pledge their fealty to “The Marriage Vow,”The Family Leader has had a quickie divorce from the ‘slavery passage.’ Didn’t want to stay together for the children, The Family Leader? Oh well, it may have disappeared from the pledge, but the internet never forgets.

FAMILY LEADER PLEDGE

 

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January 24, 2011 · 4:40 PM

Bachmann: America’s Founders ‘Worked Tirelessly Until Slavery Was No More’

 That woman is a space cadet!

  Mediaite

The bad news is that Michele Bachmann seems to have a slightly skewed vision of how America was founded. The good news? Her version is much nicer. Sure, it’s not 100% true that America’s founders “had different cultures, different backgrounds, different traditions” and that they all fought until slavery was abolished. But, hey, it sure sounds nice so why don’t we go with it?

The comments were made at Bachmann’s speech at an Iowan’s for Tax Relief Event which, unsurprisingly because of the name but importantly because of the statement it makes about her 2012 plans, took place in Iowa. There she began to talk about the great legacies the Founders imparted for us but got a few details off, especially when she began talking about slavery. Talking Points Memo has the details:

“Bachmann (R-MN) also noted how slavery was a ’scourge’ on American history, but added that ‘we also know that the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States.’

‘And,’ she continued, ‘I think it is high time that we recognize the contribution of our forbearers who worked tirelessly — men like John Quincy Adams, who would not rest until slavery was extinguished in the country.’

It’s true — Adams became a vocal opponent of slavery, especially during his time in the House of Representatives. But Adams was not one of the founders, nor did he live to see the Emancipation Proclamation signed in 1863 (he died in 1848).”

Her speech was well delivered (no zombie-ism here) and inspirational but these are some pretty bad mistakes to make. Especially when the Tea Party is so adamant that their political enemies have forgotten the lessons of the Founding Fathers. Let’s just say Bill Maher could have a lot of fun with this clip.

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