Bill of Rights

Saturday night court evangelical roundup

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What have Trump’s evangelicals been saying since our last update?

Samuel Rodriguez is upset about the prohibition on singing in California churches.

Jim Garlow agrees with Rodriguez:

Here is how Dietrich Bonhoeffer would probably respond to Rodriguez and Garlow.

Meanwhile, court evangelical journalist David Brody loved Trump’s Mount Rushmore speech:

Here is Brody again:

I don’t think you need to be a “far left latte sipper” to be troubled by what happened last night at Mount Rushmore. It was a “big celebration” during a pandemic with no masks or social distancing on a weekend in which the CDC warned people about gathering in large crowds. We already know that Don Trump Jr.’s wife tested positive for COVID-19. And don’t even get me started on Trump’s use of the American past to divide the country on Independence Day. I wonder what Frederick Douglass would have thought about Trump’s speech. By the way, I am not “far left” and have probably had ten latte’s in my life. I prefer the $1.00 large McDonald’s coffee on my way to campus. 🙂

Charlie Kirk, an evangelical Christian, bids his followers to come and die:

Does anyone want to help Kirk, the co-director of Liberty University’s Falkirk Center, reconcile the previous tweet (above) with the one below this paragraph? I am not sure he understands the meaning of “liberty requires responsibility.” As Christian moral philosopher Josef Pieper wrote, “It is the concern of the just man…to give others due rather than to obtain what is due him.” But what does Pieper, one of the great Christian intellectuals of the 20th century, know? He is not, after all, 26-year-old Trump wonder boy Charlie Kirk:

And then there is this:

Lance Wallnau is attacking another so-called “prophet” and, in the process, offers his own prophesy. He says the coronavirus, racial unrest, Christians “taking a knee,” and the tearing down of monuments are all judgments of God on America. If you have time, read the thousands of comments on the right of the video and then come back and let’s talk about my “fear” thesis.

Jenna Ellis, a spokesperson for Liberty University’s Falkirk Center, is getting into the “America was founded as a Christian nation” business.

She also liked Trump’s Mount Rushmore speech:

I would like to hear how John Hagee uses the Bible to defend free speech, the right to assemble, the right to petition, the freedom of the press, the right to bear arms, etc.:

Like patriotic ministers have been doing since the time of the American Revolution, Hagee takes New Testament passages about liberty and freedom and applies them to political freedom:

Tony Perkins is engaging in the same type of scriptural manipulation:

Gary Bauer throws thousands and thousands of hard-working American history teachers under the bus by telling them that they don’t love their country:

Robert Jeffress is back on Fox News defending his Lord’s Day morning political rally with a non-social-distanced choir. His defense if whataboutism:

The day before, Jeffress made his weekly visit with Lou Dobbs. Pretty much the same stuff:

Focus on the Family is running an interview with Eric Metaxas about his book If You Can Keep It. I point you to my review of this seriously flawed book. If you want to take a deeper dive into this, here is a link to my longer review. I assume that this was taped a while ago (the book appeared in 2016).  As I listen to Metaxas’s radio show today, and compare it with this interview, it is striking how far Trump and the aftermath of the George Floyd killing  has pushed him even further into a Christian Right brand of Trumpism.

Franklin Graham is quoting the Declaration of Independence. Here is a question: Was Thomas Jefferson right? I think the Christian tradition certainly values life. It certain values spiritual liberty in Christ. But what about political liberty? What about the pursuit of happiness? Perhaps this is something to discuss with your friends and family over the holiday weekend.

Until next time.

“Amending America” Exhibit Comes to Lancaster, Pennsylvania

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You can see the National Archive’s exhibit “Amending America: The Bill of Rights” at LancasterHistory.org in Lancaster, PA.  Learn more from Jennifer Kopf‘s piece at Lancaster Online.  Here is a taste:

Two years ago, on the 225th anniversary of that Bill of Rights, the National Archives curated an exhibit that explores how those first 10 amendments were composed. “Amending America: The Bill of Rights” then went on a cross-country tour of America that arrives in Lancaster later this week.

When “Amending America” opens at LancasterHistory.org Saturday, it will be the 11th stop on a tour that’s taken the exhibit to the presidential libraries of Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon, the home of Founding Father George Mason, a museum in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, and, most recently, to the Jewish Museum of Maryland in Baltimore.

Using reproduction documents and petitions, political cartoons and interactive stations, the exhibit also will have a feature none of the other stops on the tour has had.

Local curators have assembled a complementary exhibit on President Jame

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s Buchanan and Congressman Thaddeus Stevens. Both immensely powerful mid-19th-century politicians and both Lancastrians, Stevens and Buchanan held radically different ideas about what powers were permitted and prohibited by the Constitution.

Robin Sarratt, vice president of LancasterHistory.org, says the timing of the exhibit’s arrival here “is fortuitous.”

“Amending America,” Sarratt says, encourages the process of asking questions, of thinking about what citizenship means, about what the words in the Constitution and Bill of Rights meant in that era — and what they mean today.”

Read the entire article here.

The Real History of the Second Amendment

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CornellIn an earlier post I recommended Fordham University historian Saul Cornell‘s book A Well-Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America.  It is the best historical account of the Second Amendment that I have read.  I was again reminded of why I admire Cornell’s book when I read his recent piece at The Baffler titled “Gun Anarchy and the Unfree State.”

Here is a taste:

To begin reckoning with this challenge, it’s worth pausing to consider the entire wording of the Second Amendment. Contrary to what the NRA would have us believe, the amendment does not even mention guns, but instead proclaims, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Thus, the Second Amendment, in contrast to the First Amendment, contains a preamble; an introductory clause affirming the necessity of a well-regulated militia. This arcane Latinate construction so dear to the Founding generation was an ablative absolute. Translated into modern parlance, the amendment would read something like this: “Because a well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

Also, note what the aim of a citizen’s militia is: achieving the security of a free state. In other words, the Second Amendment not only ties the right to keep and bear arms to a particular means, but it states a clear purpose. What, then, is entailed in promoting the security of said “free state”? To begin with, we should clearly stipulate that the individual right of self defense—the one closest to the heart of modern Americans—denoted something very different from a free state’s maintenance. Americans esteemed this right, but did not have much to worry about when it came to safeguarding it. Indeed, the right was such a fixture of Anglo-American law that John Adams used it as the basis for his defense of the British troops charged with murdering civilians in the Boston Massacre. An American jury empaneled to hear that case found Adams’s argument entirely persuasive and exonerated six of the eight soldiers.

So a free state’s security was something other than procuring the self-defense of a society’s individual members. It was, rather, a collective enterprise: In the eighteenth century, the security of a free state was accomplished by a well-regulated militia—a local institution, composed of citizen soldiers. And as the wording of the amendment makes plain, that militia was subject to extensive regulation by government. Indeed, militia statutes were typically the longest laws on the books in early America. So the logical question that one ought to ask—one that seldom gets raised in the contentious modern debate over the role of guns in contemporary American society—is this: How do we maintain and promote the security of a free state when we no longer live in small rural communities and depend on well-regulated militias? How can one enjoy liberty in a society awash in guns?

This is, at bottom, a historical question—one that’s largely anathema to the NRA and other advocates of expansive gun rights. Many gun-rights advocates fail to understand the actual historical background of the Second Amendment because our debates over gun ownership typically revolve instead around a potent set of myths that cloud our historical understanding. Chief among these myths is the iconic image of the “good guy with a gun,” eagerly manufactured and marketed by American popular culture. From the dime novels of the nineteenth century to Hollywood westerns and more recent figures such as Jason Bourne, a powerful entertainment folklore has infused the gun-rights narrative.  

Read the entire piece here.

Some Good Books on the Second Amendment and Guns in America

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CornellSaul Cornell,  A Well-Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America

Saul Cornell, Who’s Right to Bear Arms Did the Second Amendment Protect?

Akhil Reed Amar, The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction

Adam Winkler, Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America

Michael Waldman, The Second Amendment: A Biography

Carol Berkin, The Bill of Rights: The Fight to Secure America’s Liberties

 

Camden, New Jersey Police and American History

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I love this story.  It encourages me to see history informing law enforcement in one of the most crime-ridden cities in the United States.  There may yet be hope for the humanities!

Here is a taste from a news story that appeared earlier this month at NJ.Com

Thursday morning was a change of pace for William Stuart.
While five weeks prior, the Camden County Police Officer was rushing through the halls of a shuttered Catholic school in Somerdale pursuing an active shooter during a drilling exercise, by 9 a.m. Thursday, he found himself in a much different kind of classroom.
Stuart was one of 50 department officers who crossed the bridge into Philadelphia to brush up on the backbone of American history at the National Constitution Center.
By the end of the week, all of the city’s 372 current officers and recruits in training will have cycled through the Center’s “Policing in a More Perfect Union” training module, which focuses on the role of the Bill of Rights in the American justice system and explores the history of policing in communities.
Chief Scott Thomson said he was drawn to the program after talking with Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, who collaborated with the Constitution Center to cultivate the curriculum and launch the program in March.
“I wanted every one of our officers to have a better understanding of justice and fairness,” said Thomson.
The core concepts are driven home through a morning that begins with a tour of the center’s exhibits and presentations, delving into the roots of the Bill of Rights’ along with the evolution of law enforcement in American history. It wraps up with frank, open discussions about current perceptions of police both among the officers and in small groups with high school students from Philadelphia.
“The officers have already sworn to uphold the Constitution, they know this stuff,” said Kerry Sautner, the vice president of visitor experience and education at the National Constitution Center. She said the program aims to put a historical framework around the issues officers wrestle with daily.
“This is foundatinal, what they’re dealing with everyday is practical,” she said.
Camden County is only the third department to cycle its officers through the Policing in a More Perfect Union program — officers from Newport News, Virginia took advantage of it following Philadelphia’s recruits — but the results so far have been encouraging, said Sautner.
Officer Stuart said the historical perspective the program helped drive home the reality that current controversies surrounding police work are far from new. It showed him that conflicts are often sparked when police are caught between adapting to cultural shifts while enforcing laws that haven’t caught up to the times.
“It’s not new. It’s the exact same issues they experienced in the 1700s,” said Stuart. “We forget we’ve already done this and dealt with these issues throughout history.”
Chief Thomson said he wanted officers to be able understand the historical context of policing in minority communities, like how officers were responsible for enforcing fugitive slave laws in the 19th century and Jim Crow laws in the 20th, and how those roles have fueled a systemic distrust of law enforcement.
“40 years ago, we were on the wrong side of many issues,” said Thomson. Officers today may not have a hand in those wrongs, he said, but they deal with their social repercussions daily.

Carson Digs A Deeper Hole for Himself

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I like Ben Carson.  He seems like a good guy.  I even agree with him on a few things.  But he is just not cut out for a presidential run.  He seems very uncomfortable in this role.  He is a brilliant neurosurgeon and a person of deep Christian faith who, to put it frankly, is in over his head.

Let’s take his recent claim that Thomas Jefferson wrote the United States Constitution.  Here is part of what I wrote on Monday about this whole incident:

Carson needs to be more careful in the way he references American history.  I think we should expect our presidential candidates to have a working knowledge of our country’s history. (I know this is asking for a lot).

I will not be voting for Carson, but part of me wants to give the guy a break on this latest Jefferson blunder.  Perhaps he just misspoke.  I do this all the time when I am lecturing.  Maybe he got confused for a moment.  

Yet instead of simply admitting that he made a mistake or misspoke, Carson went on Fox News and doubled-down on the erroneous claim that Jefferson was somehow involved in crafting the Constitution.

Here is the video.  The Jefferson stuff picks up about the 4:30 mark.

http://video.foxnews.com/v/embed.js?id=4628962819001&w=466&h=263Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com

As I predicted in my earlier post, Carson blames the media for trying to corner him with another “gotcha” question.

What is even more interesting about this interview is that Carson seems to parroting a piece that appeared earlier in the day at USA Today. The author is David Mastio, the deputy editorial page editor of the newspaper.

Mastio writes:

...here’s an interesting historical footnote to the Constitutional Convention. At the time, an early version of email was available. It was the social media of its day, called “letters.” Important people, say, the U.S. minister in France, could give pieces of paper to ship captains who’d take them by boat all the way to Philadelphia. In Philadelphia, other important people would read words scratched onto the paper and respond in kind with a “reply.”

In this fashion, early Americans could discuss important matters like constitutions and other government stuff ministers would care about. This was called “correspondence.”

Guess who was writing these letter thingies? Thomas Jefferson.

And do you know who was replying? George Washington and James Madison, among the most important framers of our Constitution.

So here’s the crazy thing: Jefferson, Madison, Washington and others were discussing how the U.S. Constitution should be written.

After the Constitution Convention was over, Jefferson had this other idea called a “Bill of Rights,” which you might have heard is a part of the Constitution. Jefferson sorta played a key role in all that First Amendment, Second Amendment stuff. If you don’t believe me, go ask the American Civil Liberties Union, which is big on rights like free speech and freedom of religion.

Saith the ACLU: “The American Bill of Rights, inspired by Jefferson and drafted by James Madison, was adopted, and in 1791 the Constitution’s first 10 amendments became the law of the land.”

The ACLU even quotes Jefferson’s argument: “A bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular, and what no just government should refuse.”

To get the basics of Jefferson’s role in the creation of the Bill of Rights, which are, as I mentioned, a pretty important part of the Constitution, all you have to do is read the Spark Notes version. Or you can get it in easy Q&A format from the U.S. Archives.

All that laughing I did at Carson’s expense? I take it back. I guess he sorta did know what he was talking about, after all.

A website is now demanding that in the wake of the Mastio piece fifteen news agencies and “verified Twitter accounts” owe Ben Carson an apology for the way they covered this issue.

Some thoughts:

1). I am still trying to figure out if Mastio’s piece is sarcasm.  I’m not sure.

2).  I am guessing that Carson’s handlers saw the Mastio piece and thought it might be useful in fending off critics on this issue.

3).  If the piece is not meant to be sarcastic it is still filled with historical problems.  Here is historian Kevin Gutzman (used with permission from his Facebook page):

One more time: 1) there is no evidence that Thomas Jefferson had any — any — effect on the “crafting” of the US Constitution, and 2) the Bill of Rights was *not* “his idea.”
1) He was in France in summer 1787, at a time when it took six weeks for a letter to cross the Atlantic to the east and longer to the west. The delegates to the Convention were all sworn to secrecy, so they could not have consulted him even if they had desired to do so and it had been practicable.
2) The first promise to seek a bill of rights was made by Federalists in Massachusetts to get Governor John Hancock and other waverers to support ratification. None of them consulted Jefferson–who was still in France, if anyone in Boston had cared. James Madison was finally persuaded to favor a bill of rights, which he had opposed, by political imperatives in Virginia: the North American Baptist movement happened to be centered in his home county, and local Baptists insisted he promise to seek amendments, particularly one like the Establishment Clause, before they voted for him over James Monroe for Congress. Everyone knew this was his motivation at the time.

Again, Carson should have just admitted he made a mistake, noted that he did get the facts straight in his book, and move on.  It is never a good idea for a political candidate to try to challenge a historian. After all, we do this stuff for a living.

The Author’s Corner with Carol Berkin

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Carol Berkin is residential Professor of History at Baruch College and a member of the history faculty of the Graduate Center of CUNY, Emerita. This interview is based on her new book, The Bill of Rights: The Fight to Secure America’s Liberties (Simon & Schuster, May 2015).


JF: What lead you to write The Bill of Rights: The Fight to Secure America’s Liberties?

CB: I wanted to challenge many of the myths that surround the first ten amendments. I knew that many Americans thought they were written at the constitutional convention, or that they were unanimously advocated by all the ‘founding fathers’ or that, from the moment they were ratified, they became the American credo. None of this was true — and the true story was far more fascinating. I knew I had to carefully read the debates in Congress over these amendments and to understand them in the context of 18th century America. Only then, could I share the story of these amendments with the reading public.
JF: In two sentences, what is the argument of The Bill of Rights: The Fight to Secure America’s Liberties?
CB: The Bill of Rights was Madison’s brilliant tactic to crush the strong opposition that continued even after the Constitution was ratified. In modern parlance, he hoped to separate the opposition’s base [the many Americans who honestly worried about a strong central government and its potential for tyranny] from its leadership [men who wanted to eviscerate the power of the new government, taking away its right to tax and regulate commerce]. Madison believed a bold statement of the rights of the people would calm popular fears even though the federal government actually had no power to enforce those rights in 1789. Most of Madison’s fellow Federalists thought a bill of rights was unnecessary, even useless but Madison persisted and eventually won.

JF: Why do we need to read The Bill of Rights: The Fight to Secure America’s Liberties?
CB: I think readers will find the book tells a fascinating story. As the men in Congress debated Madison’s proposals, they drew on their memories of British abuses and expressed their anxiety over the future of the new republic. They argued over the proper balance of power between the federal government and the state governments, an argument that still resonates today. Tempers flared; egos were exposed; foolish comments abounded. Following these debates, we can see that these men understood what a great gamble the creation of a republic was, how fragile the peoples’ liberties actually were, and how heavily the burden of preserving the new nation lay on their shoulders.

JF: When and why did you decide to become an American historian?
CB: I decided to become an American historian while I was a student at Barnard College. I loved the idea that History was a form of time travel and I wanted to visit the past and try to understand people whose views and perspectives were so different from mine. I chose the history of my own country so that I could better understand the origins of issues that matter to us today.

JF: What is your next project?
CB: My next project, The Republic in Peril, is a reevaluation of the first decade of the nation under the Constitution. It looks at how fragile this experiment in representative government was and how worried its leaders were that the experiment might, despite their best efforts, fail. I am going to look closely at four crises the Federalist in power faced, two domestic challenges to the federal government’s authority and two foreign challenges to its sovereignty and independence. As in my two previous books— A Brilliant Solution: Inventing the American Constitution, which looks at debates at the constitutional convention, and The Bill of Rights: the Fight to Secure America’s Liberties— I want to show the men who founded the nation as ordinary human beings, aware of their great undertaking, concerned that they might fail but determined to persevere.

JF: Thanks Carol.

And thanks to Megan Piette for facilitating this installment of The Author’s Corner

Gun Culture and Rights Culture

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Greg Weiner, a political science professor at Assumption College and author of Madison’s Metronome: The Constitution, Majority Rule, and the Tempo of American Politics, believes that the only way to curb gun violence is to curb the “rights culture” that defines American public life.  He argues that our obsession with rights “isolates the individual from considerations of the common good decided upon by deliberate majorities.”

Here is a taste of his piece at The Front Porch Republic:

Advocates of gun control, most of them on the political left, are justifiably pointing to the excesses of rights talk today.  But Newtown provides an opportunity for bipartisan reflection on the false absolutism and hyper-individualism of the rights culture. In this matter, liberals are not innocent.  It is the left that, for near to a century, pioneered the tactic of pressing claims of rights—understood as exemptions for the individual from the authority of the community—in the courts, short-circuiting the slow but sure political processes that require engagement with one’s neighbors and consideration of their views.  “We talk a lot around here about voting on rights,” said Rachel Maddow on an MSNBC broadcast.  “Basically, rights are rights because you are born to them; you don’t vote on rights.”

But there is a right to own guns, and it is difficult to see how it can be limited without voting on it.  The problem with the absolutist line is that it assumes politics has no role to play in determining what all rights have: namely, boundaries.  The framers of the Constitution recognized only one absolute right: the sacred liberty of conscience, and that only because it resided in an internal realm and was therefore literally impossible to regulate.  All other rights—from speech to guns—had public repercussions and were consequently subject to public limitation.

Elsewhere in the piece, Wiener mentions abortion rights:

Thus when the citizens of the District of Columbia decided their city would be safer if it banned handguns, the Supreme Court—in the case of D.C. v. Heller—told them they could not.  One need not resolve the wisdom of such a policy to see the revolution worked by the judiciary trumping the deliberate sense of a community in resolving the boundaries of rights. The resort to the courts to overturn the Affordable Care Act resulted from the same mentality.

But so does the use of the judiciary to overturn majorities on abortion or any number of other priorities prized by the left. That is not by any means to equate those issues with what happened in Newtown.  It is, however, to say there is an inescapable linkage in the absolutism surrounding rights that characterizes both sides.

Each claims its priorities are exempt from the judgment of the community.  Each is quicker to turn to the courts than to democratic persuasion.  Each claims its rights are absolute, without boundary, isolated from regulation, indifferent to the opinions of one’s neighbors.  Each amounts to a claim to do whatever one wants, whenever one wants, regardless of what others want.  And each is part of a culture of rights that, every bit as much as a culture of guns, must change if another Newtown is to be deterred.

So here is the question I am grappling with after reading this piece: What is the difference between the conservative defense of the right to own any kind of gun and the liberal defense of a woman’s right to an abortion? Guns have the potential to end lives.  Abortion does end lives.

Sunday Morning with the Carlisle Lutherans

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I spent part of my Sunday morning in Carlisle, PA speaking to the members of the weekly Adult Forum at the First Evangelical Lutheran Church of Carlisle, a congregation that is over 250 years old.

It was a very knowledgeable crowd.  One person in attendance argued that since the passing of the14th amendment, which forced the states to abide by the Bill of Rights, it was no longer possible, at least legally, to declare that the United States was a Christian nation.  It was certainly hard to argue with his point, although I did suggest that his argument rested on one of several definitions of “Christian nation.”

Thanks to Pastor Charles Brophy for the invitation.