The Tea Party Doesn't Know Shit About the Constitution.

Keep in mind, you Fundamentalists, the Constitution was designed to tell us what is legal and illegal not what is right and wrong. The Constitution does not delineate morality.

Also, the only mention it makes vis-a-vis God/Religion is prohibitory - it tells us what those things can't do in terms of our society. Thus Glenn Beck's belief that Liberals want to "separate us from our Constitution and God" is in fact combining two things as if they are always in tandem, like peanut butter and jelly and salt and pepper. They are not. They are not mutually exclusive but to suggest that they naturally go together is to be guilty of what is referred to in Logical Fallacies as an illegal use of the "And Operator" - commonly known as the "Complex Question".

Beck believes that certain shithead progressives forsook the "faithful Christian Founders" and forced the country to adopt a slew of unconstitutional measures that triggered our long decline into Obama-era totalitarianism. If the Founding Fathers and framers of the Constitution were, in fact, Christians, I might be less inclined to choke on Beck's stupidity.

In fact there's a lot of strange mingling of biblical phrases and preachy sermon language when these Tea Partiers get together. Sarah Palin says that our country has entered into a season of "constitutional repentance". It seems to me that their frame of reference is essential Christian Fundamentalism. Like those folks, they seek a Sacred Text that is faultless and changeless and which represents a Golden Age. Like any Fundamentalist, they see in their good book, only what they want to see: confirmation of their preexisting beliefs. Like other fundamentalists, they don't sweat the details and they ignore all the ambiguities. And of course, in the long tradition of Christian Fundamentalists, they demonize and scathe those who disagree with their doctrine.

If these people were at all conversant in the way the Constitution works, there might be some room to negotiate with them. But, like all Fundamentalists - Christian, Muslim, Jewish - they see things only their way and ignore whatever exists that contradicts their purity of thought.

Thus we can have someone like Tea Partier Sharon Angle can assert that "Separation of church and state is an unconstitutional doctrine." Of course it's clearly stated in the Constitution that the opposite is true, but that doesn't matter.

Ms. Angle also tells us that "Government isn't what our Founding Fathers put into the Constitution." Which seems a bit odd when the Sacred Document itself establishes the power "to lay and collect taxes" in a Federal Government, and to "provide for the common defense and the general welfare" of the people. I don't know what Constitution Ms. Angle is reading. Perhaps she has a special one.

Nevertheless, the Tea Party movement has been extremely clear about one thing: the Constitution should be followed exactly, and it should always regulate our nation. Except when it doesn't work out the way they want it to. Then they begin to customize.

Ron Paul: America should stop automatically granting citizenship to "native born children of illegal immigrants". Which would violate the 14th Amendment.

Also by Paul: he would like to prevent federal contractors from lobbying Congress - a likely violation of their First Amendment right to redress.

Sarah Palin, when asked about Roe vs. Wade, was quoted as saying that the Constitution  does, in fact, guarantee "an inherent right to privacy" but then she suggested that such a thing would be better handled at the state level  - which clearly violates Amendment 14.

The Tea Party are Constitutional purists, all right. Like the Christian and Muslim Fundamentalists they oppose any change or modernized viewing of their Sacred Texts as being sacreligious. They decry modern additions to the Constitution as "progressive" and thus evil - as if the Constitution itself did not enshrine the very concept of the Amendment process because the Founding Fathers knew that time goes on and things change. But then they go about and begin lobbying for their own self serving amendments that do, in fact, violate the Constitution. Michell Bachhmann has suggested more than forty additions to the Constitution, including:
1. an amendment to ban flag burning, which violates the First Amendment.
2. a balanced budget amendment
3. a parents' rights amendment
4. a supermajority to raise the taxes amendment
5. an antiabortion amendment
6. an anti gay marriage amendment

etc. etc. etc. Most of these attempt to legitimize her own personal morality instead of understanding that the Constitution is a legal document that was meant only to create a Governmental Philosophy and Legal Document to frame what shall be "legal" vs. what shall be "illegal".

They need to go back to school or drop the idea that they're in any way riding on the coat tails of our Founding Fathers. They are not.

An Open Letter to the Tea Party

Whatever other failings you have, can you all please stop referring to the Founding Fathers, the framers of the Constitution, as God Fearing Christians? Because nothing could be further from the truth. Those who were not abject atheists were at best Deists: people who believe that there's probably a divine power and creator, but that it's no way concerned with humanity.

James Madison: 

 

"Ecclesiastical establishments tend to great ignorance and corruption, all of which facilitate the execution of mischievous projects." 

John Adams:  

"As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation.  But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed?"

 

"I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved-- the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!"
                            -letter to Thomas Jefferson

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"The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity.  Nowhere in the Gospels do we find a precept for Creeds, Confessions, Oaths, Doctrines, and whole cartloads of other foolish trumpery that we find in Christianity."

 

"This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there  were no religion in it."

Thomas Jefferson: 

 "Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced an inch towards uniformity.  What has been the effect of coercion?  To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.  To support roguery and error all over the earth."
                             - "Notes on Virginia"

     "On the dogmas of religion, as distinguished from moral principles, all mankind, from the beginning of the world to this day, have been quarreling, fighting, burning and torturing one another, for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the human mind."
                              - to Carey, 1816

                "I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature."

 

"We discover in the gospels a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstition, fanaticism and fabrication ."

George Washington: while President Washington was a deeply private man, still those who knew him best said he was No Christian -

"Gouverneur Morris had often told me that General Washington believed no more of that system (Christianity) than did he himself."
                                -Thomas Jefferson, in his private journal, Feb. 1800

Benjamin Franklin:

"I wish it (Christianity) were more productive of good works ... I mean real good works ... not holy-day keeping, sermon-hearing ... or making long prayers, filled with flatteries and compliments despised by wise men, and much less capable of  pleasing the Deity."
                                  - Works, Vol. VII, p. 75

"Lighthouses are more helpful than churches." 

"In the affairs of the world, men are saved, not by faith, but by the lack of it."

Thomas Paine: 

"Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half of the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God.  It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind. "

"Take away from Genesis the belief that Moses was the author, on which only the strange belief that it is the word of God has stood, and there remains nothing of Genesis but an anonymous book of stories, fables, and traditionary or invented absurdities, or of downright lies." 

"All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit."
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Jesus: There's Plenty of Him to Go Around

In my brief forty-six years of existence I have found my way into many a Christian church, most of which contain a multiplicity of pictures of Jesus H. Christ. We have him in many action poses and with a variety of facial expressions, most of them of the Why the Fuck did You Do That variety. Some are a bit alarming in His interaction with children - this is not a good time for Church Leaders to be seen frolicking with the young.

One of the best things about Jesus is how amorphous he is. Since no one has actually seen him in the flesh - or no one I know - we can make Jesus be whatever we want him to be - although most historians are pretty much in agreement that he was a Jew, and thus of a certain pallor and hair color.

Nevertheless, Jesus becomes what you want him to be, in a way that you feel comfortable . . .

. . . Thus, the Jesus one finds in Baptist churches makes him look like a Country singer from the seventies - the kind of guy who likes his fried chicken and is not out of place at a NASCAR event, or wearing a large belt buckle with a bull on it.

Now clearly, the blond hair and blue eyes look is distinctly Anglo-Irish. There's no way that Mr. Christ looked this way - but then look at the people who go to these churches. This is how they want him to look.

Catholic churches have differing Jesii based on what ethnic group makes up their congregations: the catholic church I grew up in was made up mostly of Italians and Portuguese and Basques. Thus, the Jesii in that church looked like someone you might find bussing tables at a local spaghetti house. He loves ya, of course, but don't fuck with him.

The Irish in my town went to a different Catholic church. Whenever i went there, as a youth, I was disconcerted to see that their Jesus was whiter and more Irish looking than our Dago Jesus. It caused a great spiritual angst in me. It was one of my first moments of doubt.

Several years later I found myself in the unenviable position of waiting in a bus station in Indiana, waiting for a connecting bus to Atlanta. A young black male sat next to me and preached his own angry version of the gospel, one that included a brutal Black Jesus that was gon' kick yer white ass, boi.This was the kinda Jesus you can imagine goin' ape-shit in the temple.




















Over time I've seen Native-American Jesii and Latino Jesii - he's everywhere, and he's always one of us!