Posted on 11/22/2021 9:46:42 PM PST by SeekAndFind
You’re not being honest here, but I guess that’s nothing new. What you feel you have to say now and what you’ve said about the 1800s don’t match.
If I’m not mistaken, that statue is of Lenin.
Wouldn’t it be a hoot if a couple of good ol’ boys were to wrap a chain around the base of that abomination and the other end around the boom of a tow truck and pull it down?
Well you are once more calling me a liar, and I am once more perplexed about what exactly it is you think i'm lying about.
What you feel you have to say now and what you’ve said about the 1800s don’t match.
I don't feel I have to say anything. I say what I think, often when the listeners greatly despise me. And now i'm having to try to think with your mind about what I could have possibly said about the 1800s that you see as inconsistent with what I am saying now.
I think your perception of what I have said is off.
My point was that saying that “all men are created equal” didn’t apply to slaves makes you a very unlikely person to say that Jefferson, the author of the phase, was a great influence for abolition since your own reading of the phrase is opposed to the abolitionist reading. But of course, you won’t see things that way.
If Jefferson were alive today he’d send the Continental Army to New York City with orders to burn it to the ground and drive the inhabitants into the wilderness.
L
That is not my own reading of the phrase. Just as people later believed it ought to apply to slaves, so too now do I believe it applies to everyone.
This is a very different thing from recognizing the fact that when it was written and sent to England, nobody regarded it as applying to slaves. That came later.
I have always taken issue with the idea that a legal meaning can get reinterpreted to mean something it was never intended to mean when it was written. A good example of this is using the 14th amendment to legalize abortion and "gay" marriage, or make anyone born here eligible for the presidency.
None of that was intended, and attempts to interpret the 14th in that manner are dishonest.
Attempts to interpret the intent of the Declaration as freeing slaves is also dishonest. That's *NOT* what they meant when they wrote it.
Acknowledging that the phrase was dishonestly interpreted by many to mean something very different than intended does not contradict the fact that that phrase was the most significant factor in accelerating abolition in the United States.
Again, the distinction is this. Most people at the time realized it wasn't meant to apply to slaves, but they said it *ought* to apply to slaves, and they were right.
So they *MADE* it apply to slaves. They changed hearts and minds, and they used that phrase as a powerful tool to do it.
At the time, it didn’t even apply to White Americans. They believed the British treated them as subordinates and inferiors. The revolutionaries made it apply to them. It was a “should” from the beginning.
Any effort to use that language in 1776 to abolish slavery would have blown apart the coalition and there never would have been a USA.
It could not have been done until people became accustomed to the idea of equality, and that took awhile.
First they came for General Lee. We knew that was just the beginning..
In accordance with the “fad” theory that recognition should be removed for sins of the past, DeBlasio should be removed for his long-standing practice of behaving like an arsehole.
Please do not underestimate Thomas Jefferson -- sure he was somewhat... ah... complicated, but on the subject of slavery in 1776 remember Jefferson's now famous deleted sentences, condemning slavery as being forced on Americans by the British king.
So Jefferson was anti-slavery even then.
And for the rest of his life Jefferson did whatever he could to restrict & abolish slavery, even proposing Federally compensated abolition.
Of course, that's not the same thing as saying Jefferson believed in social equality for former slaves.
On the other hand, Jefferson's relations with his late-wife's half-sister can suggest his real views, even there, were somewhat... ah... complicated.
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