Constitutionally Speaking

We've all seen how the Tea Party has busily been reinterpreting the Constitution to suit its interests, often treating it as commandments handed down from the Mount. Not to mention all the quotes they have been attributing to the Founding Fathers, which you won't find in Bartlett's Quotations.I saw this zinger, "It is impossible to rightly govern a nation without God and the Bible," attributed to George Washington. It seems most within this movement have never read the Constitution nor have the first inkling of its origins, much less the religious dispositions of our Founding Fathers.

I got into some arguments with old chums on Facebook over the supposed "divine right" of the Constitution, noting that only once is "Lord" mentioned in the Constitution and that to signify the year of our Lord, not in any direct reference to the Bible, which they firmly believe the Constitution is derived from.

When I tell them that they would be more comfortable with the Articles of Confederation, like their friend Patrick Henry, they scoff, mostly because they don't even know what these articles were. The kicker today was someone quoting the preface to the Declaration of Independence, blithely unaware that when Jefferson referred to Nature's God he was referring to God in the pantheistic sense, not the Biblical sense, completely unaware that Jefferson, like most of his fellow Founding Fathers, was a Deist.

So, I posted this great website on Facebook that enumerates many of the Things That Are Not in the U.S. Constitution.

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Dispatches from Vilnius

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