ML/NJ
Everyone has blind spots. I’m not really sure which was the bigger plank.
I don’t really care much for the puritain moralists hell-bent on running other individuals’s and society’s life.
I’m very proud to say that I’m descended from John Cooke, who was the last surviving male Mayflower passenger—he had been born in Holland and was 13 when landing in the new world.
While he eventually became a deacon in the congregation, he was excommunicated after a commission he was put in charge of to investigate congregationalist-Quaker relations concluded that the Congregationalists were oppressing the Quakers. He ended life as a Baptist minister.
New England did manage to produced some good folks, but they have had some problems with hypocrisy that go back a little ways.
The Republicans of the 1850’s were worthy heirs to a number of parts of this tradition.
It’s too bad that the Pacific kind of got in the way of the attempt to continually move farther away from New England.