I GREW UP WITH THE CLICHE IN MY EAR that "you can't judge those of the past by preset day standards" though I think I always thought it was nonsense. It was invariably said to hold some figure or group up as heroic or authoritative or worthy of imitation while knowing that they were not worthy of imitation. Of course, Thomas Jefferson is the case example of this I'm going to cite today but I've also held up Madison and others of the fabled (that means having their many sins covered up) founders and framers. And it was never equally applied to all of those in the past but only to those who were put to such use. But I think it's time we look at a corollary that should have been in place all along if that rotely repeated and stupid rule of thumb is to stand.
If you aren't to make moral assessment of the real lives of such as the founders and framers by present day standards, WHY SHOULD YOU TAKE THEIR WORDS AS A STANDARD TO JUDGE PRESENT DAY ACTIONS AND STANDARDS? Last week I pointed out that unless you're going to learn from the past to gather information so as to determine present day actions and improve on those standards of the past, everything about looking at history turns it into a devalued and sentimental (that means false when it doesn't mean lying about it) exercise in the cheapest of nostalgic antiquarianism. Much of the worst of that made more saleable by the morally bankrupt standards of crappy novels and Hollywood movies and Broadway song and dance crap methods. Any emotional response, such as holding human beings and their actions in what gets passed off as conventionally felt "reverence" which isn't based in a rigorous evaluation of them can quickly turn dangerously dishonest. (See Also Leon Uris's "Exodus" and especially the crap movie they made of it. )
IN THE UNITED STATES, THAT IS MOST EVIDENT IN THE USES OF SUCH AS THE REHNQUIST AND ROBERTS COURT, THEIR PHONY "ORIGINALISM" AND "TEXTUALISM" AND WHAT OTHER LYING LABELS THEY'RE TACKING ON TO THEM DOING EXACTLY THAT AND FORCING THEIR LIES ABOUT HISTORY ON US, TODAY. Alito and Coney Barrett have done that about some of their citation of ancient British law some of which has been superseded in Britian by British Courts on the basis of that ancient legal lore not standing the test of time to answer present day conditions. If you think that's inconsequential, look at what's happening to Women with dangerous miscarriages and likely fatal pregnancies in most of the country and, quite potentially as soon as they can do it, extending their nationalization of Womens' bodies such as is done in the abortion ban states to the entire country, as, in fact, was one of the things that the Taney Court did in expanding slavery to all of the "free states" in the Dred Scott decision. I've pointed out here that their ancient ancestor, the Supreme Court "justice" who was allegedly the anti-slavery voice on the Marshall Court, Joseph Storey did much the same thing in citing ancient English law in his Supreme Court practice, law that had been, likewise, superseded in British Law even before he cited it to try to control the law in the United States. Knowing that, it's a lot less surprising that he wrote the Prigg decision, which, before Dred Scott, was the most infamous pro-slavery ruling that corrupt Court had issued. I can't think that Storey's pride in his knowledge of the history of ancient English and British law was not a major factor in why he could use the U.S. Constitution to such corrupt ends and still pride himself as being what he clearly was not. May he rot in a particularly hot region of hell with John Marshall, Roger Taney, Rehnquist and Scalia, among others. Alito and Coney Barrett, as well.
It's absurd that late medieval English or ancient British Law would have that much power over a country that was founded in those very founders rejecting the most enduring of medieval English and ancient British Law, rejecting not only the monarch which has been retained in Britain, but also the authority of the very institutions and long dead People who adopted and retained that even more authoritative British legal framing only to have our Supreme Court - especially when they want to make law from the bench that is especially a violation of rights of living People - CITE WHAT THEY HAVE REJECTED AS UNWORKABLE to make judicially legislated laws here and now. That under the framing of the Constitution, We The People and our ELECTED representatives roll over and give up when they do that is a moral abomination.
But such absurdity is, in fact, what governs us under our disastrously failed Constitution. IF YOU THINK I'VE BEEN ALL WET OVER THAT FACT, THAT THE CONSTITUTION HAS FAILED CATASTROPHICALLY, WELL, EVEN JUDGE LUTTIGE AND EMINENT LAWYERS ARE ADMITTING THAT, NOW.
This post was motivated by me reading Michael Sean Winter's very uneven piece about the Declaration of Independence posted on the 3rd. Particularly this passage.
Last weekend, I rewatched Ken Burns' 1997 documentary on "Thomas Jefferson." It celebrated his achievements while also addressing his failings. It captured the degree to which Jefferson remains an enigma. How could the man whose words and life celebrated the possibilities of human freedom, and its God-given quality, fail to disassociate himself from the greatest affront to that freedom, slavery? All these years later, there is no good answer to that question.
When the leaders of the civil rights movement spoke, they spoke first and foremost in the words of Sacred Scripture but secondly in the words Jefferson himself had penned in the Declaration of Independence. And let us always demonstrate sufficient humility to admit that if we had been born on a Virginia plantation when Jefferson had been born on such a plantation, and if we think we would have seen how to end slavery as he did not, we think very highly of ourselves.
The problem is that once the young Jefferson penned those famous - and largely correct words - at the start of the Declaration of Independence about "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," Jefferson not only never did much of anything to end the most obvious violation of that rampant among those in the Continental Congress who edited and adopted the Declaration of Independence and their suppos-ed "new order for the ages," holding Black People in slavery, he became increasingly enthusiastic about not only slave-holders holding People as property but, also, in breeding People into slavery as a means of HIM AND HIS FRIENDS increasing their wealth. He was so enthusiastic about that that he raped one of those he held in slavery and fathered children with her WHO HE HELD IN SLAVERY. There's no one who would not only never do that but who would condemn it in any age who doesn't have a right to think that they have higher moral standards than Jefferson did. I'd say they have an obligation to hold that their standards AND PRACTICE are superior to his because the lives of those potentially impacted for the worst by such as hold Jefferson up as a model of law making - whether with some claim to legitimacy in the legislature or with blatant illegitimacy from the Court or, now, with the Court's permission, as illegitimately by Presidential decree.
I would say that it's especially valuable to do that in the case of Jefferson - it's only during my lifetime that the issued words of the Declaration in question, words that have been hollowly echoed in total dishonesty for the majority of our history have been applied to the the "all men" who are People of Color, Women, LGBTQ+, etc. instead of only those white men who owned property who the founders and framers intended those to be applied to. The present day Republican-fascist reaction to that progress towards equatlity is destroying the progress we finally started making in the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts which the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts are overturning - along with even the Civil War Amendments - using their asserted fictions about the intentions of Jefferson's generation and lies about the legislative record of the 14th Amendment to do that. Looking at all of this in terms of what is moral and morally consistent and noting the failures of the men who wrote such words AND THE CONSEQUENCES OF THAT FAILURE IN THE LIVES OF THOSE MOST HARMED BY THAT FAILURE is the only good use of the past that can be had from them. If the Roberts Court Republican-fascist majority could get what they want to out of the words by telling the truth, they wouldn't have to lie so incoherently and they wouldn't have to go looking to judges who burned Women at the stake for witchcraft to find their excuses.
If you look at the Black Abolitionist literature, you will note that the hypocrisy of Jefferson, whose words are sometimes so true and whose life was a fabric of lies and hypocrisy, was a truth self-evident to those who had been held in slavery by the very class of white men he advocated breed their slaves for profit, I must point out, in his case, certainly, also for his fun. It was so self-evident that even the white abolitionists picked up on it. You certainly don't have to be a very good person, yourself, or even to consider yourself as one to know you've done better than that. What's the point of examining your conscience, as I'm sure a good Catholic boy such as Winters would advocate doing, if you were to never conclude that there are practices that are better than others?
It is a good thing for People to not be too impressed with their own moral conduct, as an Irish Catholic of what would be called the "liberal" kind, constant self-questioning of my own motives and actions is practically congenital, it even works, on occasion. But to dishonestly deny that anyone who would never do that and would be opposed to it is more moral than a Thomas Jefferson, not to mention a Madison or Washington, is being dishonest to no good purpose and, not infrequently, a really evil purpose. There were Quakers and others in Jefferson's day who gave up holding slaves and liberated them due to their finally choosing the morality of Jesus - the Golden Rule most often cited. Going back almost 1,500 years before that, St. Macrina, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and others opposed slavery, Gregory's argument's against it were particularly good. His sister and teacher Macrina convinced her widowed mother to practice equality in their household, treating those held in slavery on an equal basis with those of their own family. If I've got to have long dead figures of the past being taken as the basis of the law I have to live under, I'll take them and the like of John Woolman over Jefferson, Madison and the other slavers, any day.
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