What's so funny about that? TJ most certainly *was* a 'liberal', in the true sense of the word. Today's 'Rats, MSM, academia, and entertainment types are *not* 'liberals'. They're LEFTISTS.
OK; in the old fashioned sense, of course he was. But an old-fashioned liberal is a conservative.
bassmaner is correct. Jefferson was an old shcool "liberal". When it came to social issues he was a staunch conservitave. For example...
Nobody with a sane understanding of our constitution can seriously believe that homosexual marriage is a civil right; after all, sodomy was then illegal everywhere and remained so for the next 200 years. The Virginia statutes, drafted by Thomas Jefferson, went so far as to specify that male homosexuals should be castrated, and that holes should be drilled through the nose of female homosexuals.
Laws mean what their authors intend for them to mean, and the authors of the United States constitution uniformly regarded homosexuality as an unspeakable perversion; it was not their idea to protect it.
Jefferson drafted a bill concerning Virginia’s criminal law providing that the penalty for sodomy should be castration. See Thomas Jefferson, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew A. Lipscomb, ed. (Washington, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1904) Vol. I, pp.226-27, from Jefferson’s “For Proportioning Crimes and Punishments.”
The bill read: “Whosoever shall be guilty of rape, polygamy, or sodomy with a man or woman, shall be punished; if a man, by castration, a woman, by boring through the cartilage of her nose a hole of one half inch in diameter at the least.” (Virginia Bill number 64; authored by Jefferson; 18 June 1779)