Posted on 06/27/2003 12:44:32 AM PDT by kattracks
Edited on 07/12/2004 4:04:30 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Repeatedly, for months on end. You're making Bill Clinton look like George Washington in comparison.
Yup, I am. Since this thread started with a constitutional issue, my view was based on a belief in the same God whose help the authors sought daily in their development of the document. I believe as they did that this same God is the absolute reference for what is right and wrong.
This nation was founded on Christian principles and you can see, that the farther away we get from them, the worse society has become. I would not advocate a theocracy by any means, because basic human nature has always, without fail, perverted those types of governments. I would advocate, however, Christians living their principles in whatever occupies them in either the government or private sector.
Don't try pushing the burden of proof onto me.
Why not? If Jesus Himself were to come back to day I doubt you would accept anything He said or did as proof of who He is. I’ll point again the single cell, its intelligent design and intricate function. To believe its repeated occurrence is the result of a original random happenstance requires far more faith than to believe it was created by God.
However, since between the two of us, you have the superior reasoning, convince me by tests can be made with predictable and repeatable results that can be observed that my God doesn't exist.
Yet another lie out of your mouth, I see the pattern now. The ONLY point you proved is I don’t fact check everything and take for granted the accuracy of information from someone I once thought had the integrity to debate their cause. So since ling is the best you can do to hypocritically justify regulating certain behaviors and not others with your social experiment of a political system I’ll know to look for your BS in the future, thanks for the lesson.
pain you remain a hypocrite and a liar.
paine being a sleezy liar and hypocrite? I concur.
The truth is inconsequential to ignorant fanatics.
The only thing pain can pass off is being the characteristic Liberaltarian who can’t argue the merits of his liberal experiment without being a LIAR and a HYPOCRITE.
Flaming prototypical example of his cult.
Dr. Mark Kleiman, a professor at Harvard University, contributed the following:I tried to verify the purported Lincoln anti-prohibition quote. Yes, we have no bananas.
The standard reference is The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, (8 vols.) Roy P. Basler, Ed., Rutgers University Press, 1953. It gives reports (though not verbatim texts) of several of Lincoln's speeches in the legislature, including remarks on December 14 1840 on "Payment of Interest on the Public Debt" and on December 19 "Concerning Expenditures for Public Printing," but nothing on December 18, and nothing at all about alcohol or temperance (according to the index) during Lincoln's entire period of service in the legislature except the great and unduly neglected speech to the Washington Temperance Society of Springfield on February 22 1942. The index also gives no reference to the Maine Liquor Law of 1846, the first prohibition act, or to the word "prohibition."
A more recent source is Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, (2 vols.) Library of America, 1989. Again, nothing on that date, and nothing on "alcohol" "temperence" "prohibition" or "Maine Liquor Law" in the entire period, except for the Washington Temperance address (which I hope someone with a scanner will post here).
While it's impossible to be sure that Lincoln didn't say something, I will give fifty to one that there is no authentic record of any such speech anytime in Lincoln's career. That's based on the results of my search, but also on three other observations:
1. The term "prohibition" does not appear to have been in the contemporary political vocabulary with respect to alcohol control laws.
2. Lincoln stood well enough with the temperance movement to be invited to give the Washington's Birthday address to the Washington Temperance Society of Springfield in 1842. It's hard to believe that this would have been true if prohibition had been a live issue and Lincoln on the pro-liquor side of it.
3. Temperance, along with abolition, nativism, the protective tariff, and women's rights, was among the movements that constituted the original Republican party. Lincoln was bold in attacking the nativist (American or "Know-nothing") wing, but if he had picked a quarrel with the temperance faction there would surely be some record of it. In his campaign against Douglass in 1858, he was forced to deny Douglass's charge that in his youth he had kept a "grocery" (package-goods store and tavern), but his supposed anti-prohibition views never became an issue.
After a little more research (to his credit) Dr. Kleiman came back with the following:
I have to take back what I said about there being no evidence of Lincoln's supporting a prohibition law in Illinois.
The Basler collection has a letter from Lincoln to Henry Whitney on June 7, 1855, lamenting the electoral defeat of Lincoln's friend Logan -- "worse beaten than any man ever was since elections were invented" -- and adding "It is conceded on all hands that the prohibitory law is also beaten." The "also" suggests that Lincoln was a supporter of the law.
From Dale Gieringer, head of California NORML:
I believe Mark K. is right that the Lincoln quote is apocryphal.
It was investigated by a Lincoln scholar at the request of Ollie Steinberg of the Minnesota Grassroots party. Like Mark, he found no record of any speech by Lincoln on the alleged date (Dec 18, 1840).
I've been told that according to the Home Book of Quotations (16th edition), it was fabricated in the 1880s - apparently by anti-Prohibitionists in Atlanta courting the Negro vote. Lincoln was well-known for his temperance sympathies. According to Herbert Asbury's "The Great Illusion," he authored a dry law modeled on the Maine law, which was rejected by Illinois voters in a special referendum on June 4, 1855. He was also alleged to have authored and signed a total abstinence pledge in 1846. According to temperance authorities, Lincoln was reluctant to sign the 1862 whiskey tax that helped fund the Civil War, on grounds it would condone the liquor trade. According to a temperance leader who spoke with him on the day of his assassination, Lincoln predicted that the next great question after slavery would be abolition of the traffic in legalized liquor.
I'm sorry to say that the Lincoln quote seems bogus, since I had it printed on California NORML's matchbooks. It's so good, I feel tempted to quote it as "attributed to Lincoln."
Looks like a misquotation of something written by a former Penthouse magazine consultant living in Mexico.
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