Posted on 12/19/2004 6:19:45 AM PST by TFine80
It is news guaranteed to make many Republicans squirm. Was Abraham Lincoln, founder of the party now seeking a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage in America, actually gay himself?
A new book, published next month, certainly thinks so. The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln by C.A. Tripp produces evidence that one of America's greatest Presidents had a long-term relationship with a youthful friend, Joshua Speed, and shared his bed with David Derickson, captain of his bodyguards.
Tripp, a former researcher for sex scientist Alfred Kinsey and an influential gay writer, includes asides by many of Lincoln's close friends. 'He was not very fond of girls, as he seemed to me,' his stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln, once told a friend.
It also includes a diary excerpt by one upper-class Washington woman who wrote of Derickson: 'There is a Bucktail soldier here devoted to the President, drives with him, and when Mrs L is not home, sleeps with him. What stuff!'
Scholars have long debated Lincoln's sexuality, and as early as the 1920s were making veiled references to his relationship with Speed. However, critics say that in the pioneer days men sleeping together in rough circumstances was not uncommon.
Now Tripp has discovered letters between Lincoln and Speed which supposedly betray a deep intimacy.
But Tripp's book really breaks new ground in its exhaustive portrayal of many of Lincoln's possible gay lovers, including one man who said Lincoln's thighs 'were as perfect as a human being could be'.
'Make no mistake - Abe Lincoln was gay,' said Professor Scott Thompson, from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts.
But David Donald, a Harvard professor and respected Lincoln biographer, has disputed Tripp's findings in his own book, We Are Lincoln Men, published last year, and says there is no definitive proof of Lincoln having affairs with any men.
See "Gettysburg" or "God's and Generals." 19th century American men could be more effusive in their expressions of sentiments -- particularly of friendship for each other -- precisely because homosexual activity was so uncommon. So someone looking at letters now with modern assumptions in mind would likely get the wrong idea.
When we're studying history in school, or when we come back years later to the history we learned there, it's easy to get carried away by some apparently novel or iconoclastic conspiracy or scandal theory. The problem is that you have to know the context to be able to assess just what the texts say. What might look strange or shocking or appear to be definite evidence of some intention or action or emotion, may simply be part of the way people expressed themselves in ordinary or expected situations at the time.
My mother lives in Pennsylvania and I live in Ohio. Just because Bush won Ohio by 100,000 votes and lost Pennsylvania by 100,00 votes you think we should be in different countries. You clearly think the least excuse justifies secession ("no minimum threshold"). You aren't a Conservative; you are an Anarchist, and you clearly have no use for the United States of America as currently constituted. That's too bad.
bump
'Make no mistake - Professor Scott Thompson is gay,' said Max Combined.
I don't think anyone has, at least not yet. It may have something to do with the fact that the places where the party was formed in Michigan and Wisconsin are regarded as blue, or Democrat, states, and Republican strongholds are now in the South. More likely, the party leaders were too busy with the election, and Republicans forgot their own past. What looks good in an off-year and helps keep the party in the news might be seen as a distraction in an election year when it's necessary to focus on winning every possible vote.
There's nothing strange about the silence. The Democrats turned 200 some time in the 1990s, and didn't have much -- or anything -- to say about their anniversary either. I suppose TV dominates and makes the present far more important than the past. Also, the old regional loyalties that bound the South to the Democrats, and the Northeast and Middle West to the Republicans don't apply any more, so celebrations wouldn't have the natural feeling that they had when those attachments were still strong (that might be all the more reason to make something of such anniversaries, though).
It's unfortunate. Time was when parties remembered these things. Marking the anniversary might have helped the Republicans to bring their origins and history back into the public eye. It might have made some uncommitted voters more interested in the party and give it a second look.
All true. It is probably too late in the year now to do anything except maybe a year end note somewhere.
Its may be a religious problem for some but its a financial problem for everyone who pays taxes.
I had thought of that, since we all pay for AIDS, hospices, etc.
But that starts us on the slippery slope of condeming ALL elective behavior.
Heat with firewood? You are exposing your neighbors to benzopyrenes and PAH's and increasing their chances of cancer. Call the EPA!
Like to eat too much? Call the police!!! You are raising everyone's health insurance costs!
Drive an Assault SUV? You are killing the whales, on porpoise!!! Call Geenpeace!
And smoking? Call the MARINES! The SKY is falling!!!
No, with nearly six billion people soon, everything somebody does affects everyone in ways that are trivial or serious...so the comparisons cancel out, I would think, since that is a universal argument for everything.
Lincoln trashed the Constitution on several accounts MM. The "might makes right" defense always turns into a p!ssing match.
You seem to forget that every person who lives is a state that voted for Kerry in this election was not a Kerry supporter. In Iowa, you had a tiny margin that likely was the product of fraud. You'd really be "ecstatic" to see a minority of voters deprive every other Iowan of his/her U.S. citizenship?
Seems any "conservatives" who failed to see the wisdom of secession before the election should certainly see it now. One thing is for sure. No blue stater in his right mind would go to war to keep them in. I say good riddance.
You really think it should be that easy to deprive us of our American citizenship? Then you'd obviously approve of this scenario: For one brief election, the state in which you live happens to swing Democratic. That legislature immediately secedes, and joins Canada under terms that permit secession from that union only with an 80% pleciscite. In effect, because of the vagaries of one election, every single citizen of your state loses their American citizenship. Including you, hoser.
If you're real lucky, "Canada" would close its borders with the U.S. In essence, you will have been kidnapped and become a Canadian citizen. I hope you like back bacon and minor league, and Frenchies...
By the way, if you think a state can lawfully secede based on principles of self-determination, why not a county, city, village, or single individual? After all, a state is just an artificial a construct as is a nation.
Yeah, your position is the real "conservative" one, alright.
That graphic is so gay.
They're saying that Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer is now gay as well.
Everybody is gay, apparently.
Did you see Team America? Everyone has AIDS as well.
Turns out pretty much everybody who's dead now was gay, according to the unknown "historians" trying to sell a book nobody would buy otherwise.
The problem is that you are thinking of this in historical context rather than practical reality.
Being a citizen of the U.S., and of my state, means that I have certain basic rights protected by those governments. If you really believe in secession of counties and towns, then consider what happens if in just one election, a group of radicals obtains a slim majority in a county. They decide to secede, nationalize property, and establish a commune. And you are stuck. Everything you've worked for your entire life is gone, because your basic rights are at the mercy of a slim majority's ability to secede.
To put it another way, secession of the form you endorse is the ultimate tyranny of the majority, with absolutely no protected minority rights. And it amounts to giving others the right to deprive you of your U.S. citizenship. How'd you like it if some wackos moved into your county, seceded, and then voted to become part of Red China? Or Iran? Maybe they'd institute Sharia law.
The forcible retention of your town or city in the union is designed to protect the fundamental rights of the minority living in that governmental unit.
When you talk about legal rights/ political powers, you have to consider the possibility that those rights and powers will be exercized in a manner opposed to what you might imagine. I don't think you've thought through the repercussions of what you've advocated in terms of it being a tyranny of the majority.
As for the Civil War, I think the argument as to whether the states should have had the legal right to secede is a legitimate one. On the other hand, I also believe that because those governments recognized and enforced slavery, they lost any legitimate claim to sovereignity, and anyone had the right to invade those states to end the institution forcibly.
To put that in historical perspective, lets say the Nazis would not have invaded the rest of Europe, but instead would have focused on the extermination of jews, etc., within its borders. At that point, any nation had the moral right to invade Germany and stop that genocide with military force. Likewise, any claim the south had to "sovereignity" fell because the sovereignity was morally illegitimate due to slavery.
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