Posted on 07/08/2021 6:50:33 AM PDT by ProgressingAmerica
“free love” advocates
World Magazine editor Melvin Olasky, historian of 19th century newspapers benefitting from abortion advertising (”menstrual irregularity” cures for women who had failed to menstruate because they were pregnant, in other words, abortifacient “pessaries”), wrote a book.
Titled “Abortion Rites”, it was mainly to refute the claim in another book that English Common Law allowed abortion. Olasky showed that in Revolutionary/Colonial America, when a woman became pregnant, the father was forced into a “shotgun” marriage, and that many of these were perfectly happy.
And Olasky records at least one case in which an aborting woman was executed, during that period.
Olasky related how the “free love” movement was related with the 1840s “spirit rapping” religion, started by the Fox Sisters in about 1843 in Hyde Park, NY, variously called Spiritism or Spiritualism, later debunked by Harry Houdini.
These spirits were real, but they were unclean. Spiritism formed a dirty, hidden motive for the spiritual causes of the Civil War. It wasn’t just the southern proponents of The Peculiar Institution who were responsible for the carnage of the Civil War.
In the North, up to 4 million of the smart-set, the upwardly mobile, were adherents or casual hangers on to the seance religion.
Their religion’s sexual angle taught that it was immoral to bring into the world an unloved child.
Fifty years later, Margaret Sanger was a participant in seances. She, perhaps only coincidentally, was in large measure responsible for bringing this viewpoint to the 1960s, in the phrase
A World full of Wanted Children.
Ping
Well, thank you for your consideration, but I don't see this topic as very related to what I normally discuss. I think slavery is bad and should have never existed, but I don't think people should pretend that it wasn't normal at one time.
It was legal and normal for "four score and seven years" of this nation's existence. The manner in which it was abolished was not the way it should have been done and the way it was done has opened up another entirely bad can of worms.
Our current abusive Federal leviathan grew right out of that war.
Liberal kooks. That's what I try to tell people, but they want to believe what they want to believe.
You two guys are proving my point about how historians have covered it up with all of this CW-era navel gazing as if everything was brand new in 1840.
Separately,
DiogenesLamp, as to this audiobook, it’s more related to our discussions. The last comment you made to me was that you think we talk past each other - I tend to agree. I’m not trying to re-litigate the civil war because as I said above it’s boring.
But I’m not letting the progressives off the hook as you have done and eagerly do. What this book points to (parts of it) is the fallacy that the progressives have created, right up to the 1619 project.
Something I have told people for years is this.
If you want to understand how to get out of a bad situation, you need to understand how you got into it." Much that is wrong with this nation today comes from the civil war.
Anchor babies? 14th amendment. That wasn't the intention of the 14th, but it is the unintended consequence.
"Gay" marriage? 14th amendment.
Abortion on Demand? 14th amendment.
Banning prayer in schools? 14th amendment.
Wickard v Fillburn? Incorporation doctrine from the 14th amendment.
Just a few examples of how the civil war is still screwing up America today.
This is why we talk past each other. All of this is provably caused by the progressives some four decades after the timeframe you claim. There’s a huge four decade gap you can’t account for.
You’re essentially a friend to the progressives. Wasting massive amounts of your time tilting at windmills.
Who was Margaret Sanger?
There’s a huge four decade gap you can’t account for.
Who was Roger Baldwin?
You’re essentially a friend to the progressives.
Mother Jones?
(It is not) easy to imagine the northern states, victorious in a Civil War that lead to the fourteenth amendment, should have decided to turn over to the federal courts not only the protection of the rights of freed slaves but an unlimited power to frustrate the will of the Northern states themselves. The only significant exercise of judicial review in the past century had been Dred Scott, a decision hated in the North and one hardly likely to encourage the notion that courts should be given carte blanche to set aside legislative acts. ... Had any such radical departure from the American method of governance been intended, had courts been intended to supplant legislatures, there would be more than a shred of evidence to that effect. That proposal would have provoked an enormous debate and public discussion.
Also:
We know there is no evidence that the ratifiers imagined they were handing ultimate governance to the courts. We know that a constitutional revolution of that magnitude would have provoked widespread and heated (to put it mildly) discussion but there is no record of any such discussion.
You see, Robert Bork distrusted the progressives. The progressives said "here is the new truth about the 14th amendment", and Bork simply went and got the debate notes from when they created the 14th, and of course there's no evidence of any of the progressives claims. (I'm sure he probably reviewed some news reports of the era as well.)
What a surprise. Progressives are liars. That's shocking, SHOCKING news there.
"Who was Margaret Sanger?"
She was a person who I cannot trust. Same for Baldwin and Jones and Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Croly and Theodore Roosevelt and Walter Lippmann and on and on.
When these poisonous people make a claim, I know that the opposite of what they claim is the truth.
So what do they claim about the 14th? I know for a fact that the opposite is the truth.
Why do you believe their claims? Why do you believe their claims without evidence? I'll end this with a simple question for you. Have you ever downloaded the debate notes from the framing of the 14th amendment and read the discussions that took place? It's either yes or no.
There was a strong Christian abolitionist movement that stood apart from the "kook" element. Linking opposition to slavery to heretics and nuts was a common strategy of pro-slavery propagandists. To some extent, it worked, because theologically orthodox abolitionists weren't as flashy as those with more radical ideas, but the split of the Protestant denominations into Northern and Southern churches before the Civil War indicates that there was opposition to slavery among theologically orthodox Christians. For better and for worse, there has long been a crusading, world-bettering strain in Christianity (not just in the Mainline Protestant denominations, but also in Evangelical Christianity) that political ideologues have trouble coming to terms with.
Have you read the 14th amendment? The first part is mostly straightforward and not very objectionable, but the second part is the worst bunch of crap gobbledygook that a committee could have created. It is that second part which has caused the vast majority of the trouble with the Federal courts.
Not intending to create a mess does not excuse people from having done it.
And there is no way the 14th amendment would have passed had the Southern states been allowed to vote as they wished. That was the consequence of the Civil War. To let Northern liberal kooks set policy for the entire nation turned out to be a series of ongoing disasters.
I'll end this with a simple question for you. Have you ever downloaded the debate notes from the framing of the 14th amendment and read the discussions that took place? It's either yes or no.
No. I read them online without downloading them. And there were some really stupid points brought up in the debates on the 14th amendment. I have long argued about our "anchor baby" policy, and it is clear that is an area where the 14th was better written originally, and then made worse because stupid people (Senator Jacob Howard) decided to meddle with the previous verbiage. Look up the section on "local allegiance" and how they mucked that up.
By the way, my tagline is a statement from John Bingham taken from the debates on the 14th amendment.
Sure, but we are way far away from even that. We have a whole cloth cherry picking of single words in order to justify anything and everything. The best example I think I could come up with is Santa Claus. How many of us tell our kids that this fat man is coming down the chimney with presents? Well, the presents are there under the tree aren't they? See, that's proof of all that the 14th amendment contains.
For a solid real-world (SCOTUS) example is Jefferson's Danbury letter and its use on the courts by two separate notable cases. In Reynolds v. United States, the court cites the Danbury letter. Word count? 132. Everson has a word count of 8. One of these two cases clearly set out to be dishonest and the other did not. With 8 words everybody has said everything and nobody has said a thing.
Look, with that kind of word count you could prove that in my past discussions with you I've discussed that the moon is made of swiss cheese. Which is exactly what progressives do and have done with the 14th and any other thing that they think they can gain advantage from.
The progressives desperately need a focus on intent when it comes to the 14th. That's where they win because they can make it whatever they want. The reality is there's no evidence for any of this it's been stretched so far, we're not in intent anymore. We're walking down the street in Mauritius. The progressives are simply flat out lying. That's why there's a 40 year gap. It wasn't until Woodrow Wilson invented the living constitution that we end up with Gitlow and all the rest of it.
As to the reading of the debate notes, I find that rather commendable. I too found various oddities in my readings,(and the amendment itself) but nothing anywhere near the realm of the outright hoaxes that have been cooked up out of the 14th. Bork's observations are dead on accurate and having read the notes that's why I trust his observation.
The 14th is just one of the bad consequences of the civil war which we are still living with today. One of the other is the consolidation of power in Washington DC and New York which is the primary problem we are currently affected with right now.
Also, you cite a 40 year gap, but you don't seem to be taking into account that the liberals ran with their power for those 40 years and it was not until Teddy Roosevelt started addressing issues of monopoly and "crony capitalism" that anything started to be done about the problem.
Now you're just picking fights.
What is objectionable about pointing out Teddy Roosevelt reigning in corporate crony capitalism? Collusion between corporations and government is fascism, and we don't need any of that.
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