>So you think that the participants in Shay's Rebellion were just a bunch
>of ruffians.
No. Why would I? Just because I don't demonise the Founders doesn't mean that I think everything done by them or by their agents or by people who may have once said hello to them in the street is above reproach!
>And seen in the context of their times they also were precisely
>what Dr. Johnson called them, a bunch of slavedrivers.
Oh yes? All of them claimed ownership of enslaved people, did they?
>I really cannot
>extend the same "historical excuse" to the savagery of slavery in 1776
>that one can extend to slavery in (say) 405 b.c.e., when even the slaves
>had no objection to it in principle.
I don't see why not. It's not as though slavery had been eradicated everywhere else. Hell, it's still not extinct today, Carrol! And the time-limited slavery of indenturement was alive and thriving at the time.
>Can there be any more hypocritical
>statement in all of human history than the first sentence of the Declaration.
er, yes, quite a lot of them. Many of them being spoken as we read and write here.
>And if the Bill of Rights was so radical, how come so many men, women
>and children had to die before (in the 1950/60s) the U.S. Supreme Court
>began regularly (if only for a while) to see it that way? What makes you
>think that you are so much smarter at divining "original intent" than all
>those federal judges over almost 200 years?
Carrol, have you considered getting your vitriol levels checked? I think they're overflowing. :-)
>Those wonderful Founding
>Fathers merely set the stage for what (proportionately to population)
>must have been one of the bloodiest wars in history to give minimal
>and merely formal meaning to the first sentence of the Declaration.
>And even when reinterpreted by all that blood, the Bill of Rights merely
>presided (with full Supreme Court approval) over what Mark Twain,
>a century ago, aptly named the United States of Lyncherdom.
The US Constitution is physically just ink on parchment, or some substrate. If the functionaries charged with its support are faithless to their oaths, then we have lynchings and many other criminal acts perpetrated under color of law. That's not the fault of the Document or of the Framers. They did what they could do. It's bootless to complain that what they did is worthless because of its imperfections.
Twain was a cynic, but he too believed in the promise of the Constitution -- he would never have been so angry at its betrayal, else.