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To: rashley
For those not comfortable with Libertarianism, try “Natural Law” instead. There is not much difference, and Natural Law relies on morality. The Founding Fathers were clearly Natural Law proponents.

You might want to go back and look up what the Founders actually did, the laws that they passed.

In today's world they would be considered extremist right-wingers when it came to "imposing their morality" on others.

The problem here is that we extrapolate from the Constitution to their views on society and laws in general. The Constitution is (from an historical perspective) a wildly libertarian document.

This is not because the Founders were libertarians but because they wanted a limited federal government. With rare exceptions the state governments were not limited at all, and used their powers enthusiastically to impose morality.

The Bill of Rights didn't even apply to the states till after the Civil War, and states violated them all the time. For instance, southern states made it a crime to speak in favor of abolition and prohibited abolitionist newspapers, both violations of the First Amendment.

36 posted on 12/02/2012 4:33:14 AM PST by Sherman Logan
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To: Sherman Logan

Thank you for a carefully worded and very accurate correction to the sometimes wild assertions about limited government that show up on this forum. The idea that the founding fathers would have been OK with—or tolerated in law—some of the perversity we now take for granted in the USA is simply ludicrous.


49 posted on 12/02/2012 6:20:40 AM PST by madprof98
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