America Already Had a Gay President

Gay Democrat presidential nominee candidate Pete Buttigieg.

With South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, a gay man married to a man, showing himself to be surprisingly popular among 2020 Democrat nomination contenders, the chatter classes are talking up a storm about Buttigieg and what his candidacy might mean.  The chatter overlooks the reality that were he to be elected, Buttigieg would not be the first gay president of the United States. All that's needed to understand this truth is  to look at history that has not been re-written to make individuals conform to the heterosexual normative.  Over the years I have written several pieces on the fact that Abraham Lincoln was likely gay.  One such piece can be found here.  

William Rufus King.

But Lincoln was not the only possibly gay president.  A college and law school classmate originally from Alabama cross posted a piece from AL.com on Facebook that looks at President James Buchanan - America's only "bachelor president" - and his relationship with William Rufus King (who also served as U.S. vice president and, maybe more surprisingly, was a gay senator from Alabama).  Here are article excerpts:

“If elected, you would be the first openly gay president of the United States,” Stephen Colbert said to Pete Buttigieg after the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, declared his candidacy. While the characterization of being openly gay or “out” is relatively new, the fact is the United States has already had a gay president whose contemporaries knew it: James Buchanan. Indeed, the United States has also had a gay vice president and, maybe more surprisingly, a gay senator from Alabama.

If students taking U.S. history classes are taught anything about Buchanan, they learn that he was "our only bachelor president." How quaint. But, by using euphemisms, we falsely educate students - indeed all Americans - about the realities of this country's history. We also distort how and why Buttigieg's sexual identity matters today.

Before becoming president in 1857, Buchanan openly lived with William Rufus King, who at various times served as senator from Alabama, ambassador to France and, finally, Franklin Pierce's vice president. They met in Washington as young politicians, and lived together on and off for more than 16 years until King's death from tuberculosis in 1853.

Buchanan’s biographer, Jean H. Baker, believes that his relationship with the Southerner King partially explains why this Pennsylvanian was a “doughface,” a Northerner who did not oppose slavery. Indeed, Buchanan explicitly urged the Supreme Court to deliver an expansive ruling in the Dred Scott case - which denied freed slaves American citizenship and forbade Congress from regulating slavery in U.S. territories - and lobbied Congress to admit Kansas as a slave state.

How do we know Buchanan and King were a couple? In 1844, after King assumed his posting in Paris, Buchanan wrote a letter to a friend, complaining about being alone and not being able to find the right gentleman partner:

"I am now 'solitary and alone,' having no companion in the house with me. I have gone a wooing to several gentlemen, but have not succeeded with any one of them. I feel that it is not good for man to be alone; and should not be astonished to find myself married to some old maid who can nurse me when I am sick, provide good dinners for me when I am well, and not expect from me any very ardent or romantic affection."

Maybe he was only looking for a roommate, but who "woos" a roommate? And he admits he would not deliver "ardent or romantic affection" to a woman.

Similarly, King wrote Buchanan from Paris:

"I am selfish enough to hope you will not be able to procure an associate who will cause you to feel no regret at our separation. For myself, I shall feel lonely in the midst of Paris, for here I shall have no Friend with whom I shall commune as with my own thoughts."

Their peers knew about their relationship, which Buchanan and King made no real effort to hide. Andrew Jackson referred to King as "Miss Nancy" - a euphemism for a homosexual.

Other contemporaries called King Buchanan's "better half," and one congressman referred to him as "Mrs. B." All this would be quite peculiar if Buchanan was not gay. And we are not likely to get more explicit acknowledgment because both Buchanan and King had their personal papers burned after death. By not openly discussing this moment, we forget that being gay in the mid-19th century did not automatically exclude a man from national leadership. The idea that some people, including politicians and social leaders, are gay was not news or shocking to our forefathers. Americans generally considered it a private matter, and irrelevant to holding or performing public office. We obscure or even deny all this history, and, consequently, we miseducated our children and misdirect our attention. Moreover, we obfuscate perhaps the one positive step we took as a country in electing James Buchanan, who makes almost every list of the worst U.S. presidents. Let's stop pretending Buchanan was a bachelor, and take a lesson from our forebears. Instead of focusing on a candidate's sexuality, let's spend our time assessing their aptitude to lead our country in this perilous moment in history.

The Men Behind the Man: Abraham Lincoln’s Gay Lovers

Back in 2010 I wrote a two part piece on this blog and another pieces all focused on Abraham Lincoln's likely same sex sexual orientation.  As noted, two pieces appeared as posts on this blog and the third appeared in the old Bilerico Project to which I was a contributor for a number of years.   The pieces elicited both positive and negative reactions.  At the time I noted that the pieces had "created quite a bit of commentary and several personal attacks in comments (which I did not approve for publication because of their nastiness). I was particularly surprised by the number of comments by authors who were incensed that I referred to Lincoln as “gay” as opposed to “bisexual.” . . . to these folks it was nothing short of heresy to recognize that someone gay can have sex with an opposite sex partner – even if it is merely only the result of trying to do “what’s expected by church and society” - and still be GAY.  I continue to believe that the issue IS relevant and it is through accurate history that minds can sometimes be opened and prejudice defeated."  Ironically, after writing my first 2010 post, a reader forwarded me a copy of the last segment of William Hanchett’s piece in the Lincoln Herald (which apparently is not available on line and the contents of which can be found summarized here).  Now, Mark Segal has republished a 2011 piece on the issue in the newly revived Bilerico Project that looks further at the men who were Lincoln's likely gay lovers.  Here are lengthy article excerpts (read the entire piece):

Abraham Lincoln (1809-65) may likely be the most studied and researched of the United States presidents. The first reference to him possibly being “homosexual” came from notable Lincoln expert Carl Sandburg in his 1926 biography, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years. In describing the early relationship between Lincoln and his close friend, Joshua Fry Speed, Sandburg wrote “a streak of lavender, and spots soft as May violets.” This line got historians talking about an issue from which many had previously shied away.

Still, the biography was written in the early 20th century, a time when such topics were only discussed in whispers. But by including the line, Sandburg felt the relationship deserved acknowledgement. It wasn’t until 2005 when the first book was published on Lincoln’s relationships with men, C.A. Tripp’s The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln.

Detractors of Lincoln’s possible homosexuality, such as historian David Herbert Donald, often say there is no new evidence on Lincoln. Yet historians continue to draw fresh conclusions from Lincoln’s letters. Those who attempt to refute Lincoln’s possible “homosexuality” usually focus on one particular incident — of the many — that supports the theory: his relationship with Speed.

Yet history, like everything else, is open to interpretation and influenced by new findings. Bias also motivated the retelling of historical events. The best example of bias in American history is the story of Thomas Jefferson and his slave/concubine Sally Hemings, which was not accepted as a truthful account until 1998 — and only after DNA proof. African-American citizens — not historians — led the effort to give Hemings her rightful place in history. Likewise with Lincoln, most historians have referred to isolated facts rather than the pattern of events in his life to tell his personal story. Will history once again prove historians wrong?

This poem, about a boy marrying a boy, is thought to be the first reference to gay marriage in U.S. history. A 20-year-old man in rural Indiana wrote it 182 years ago. That young man was Abraham Lincoln. . . . . The poem was included in the first major biography of Lincoln, written by his law partner, William Herndon. Revisionists omitted it in subsequent editions. It didn’t reappear in Herndon’s edition until the 1940s.

In 1837, Lincoln moved to Springfield, Ill., to practice law and enter politics. That’s where he met the two men who would be his greatest friends throughout his life. One, Joshua Fry Speed, became his bed partner for a while; the other was law partner Herndon. Beyond the revelation that Lincoln and Speed had an intimate friendship, little has been written about how diligently Speed worked for Lincoln’s legal and political career. Speed’s name popped up in many of Lincoln’s legal filings and on the Illinois Whig Party’s central committee. The two were almost inseparable. Most Lincoln historians agree this relationship was the strongest and most intimate of the president’s life. What they don’t agree on is why they slept in the same bed together for four years when they had the space and means to sleep separately, as was expected of men their age.

Both bachelors reportedly were hesitant to tie the knot, but it was a de-facto requirement to have a wife if you wanted to move in political circles — or at least create the perception of interest in marriage. Both Speed and Lincoln dreaded this “requirement,” as evidenced by Lincoln’s letters. Speed takes the marriage plunge first . . . . At this precise time, Lincoln suffered a mental breakdown. Historians have been all over the map as to what caused the breakdown, but it was so intense that friends, including Herndon, worried he would take his own life. Lincoln only recovered after Speed invited him to visit him and his new wife in Kentucky.

Lincoln’s most emotional and intimate writings were contained in his letters to Speed. From the time they lived together until shortly after Speed married and moved to Kentucky, Lincoln always signed his letters “forever yours” or “yours forever.”

In 1862, Lincoln met Capt. David Derickson, who served as his bodyguard, providing protection for the president when he commuted from the White House to his cottage at the Soldier’s Home. Lincoln spent about a quarter of his presidency at the cottage, which allowed him some escape from D.C.’s summers and from public interruptions at the White House.

Lincoln and his bodyguard became close, and historians Tripp and David Herbert Donald noted two recorded mentions that Lincoln and Derickson slept in the same bed: Derickson’s superior, Lt. Col. Thomas Chamberlain, and Tish Fox, the wife of Assistant Navy Secretary Gustavus Fox, both wrote about it. Tish wrote in her diary that Derickson was devoted to Lincoln and “when Mrs. Lincoln was away, they slept together.” . . . . The Bucktails witnessed the relationship between the president and his bodyguard, which was public enough that they knew Derickson kept him company when Mrs. Lincoln traveled, and wore his nightshirt. Historical interpretations aside, why would the president, then in his 50s, sleep with his bodyguard?

Taken individually, accounts of Lincoln with other men may not offer enough proof that he was gay. But the pattern reveals a man who, in his sexual prime, slept exclusively with another man for four years — two of those years (according to Donald) without romancing someone of the opposite sex; who wrote a poem about a boy marrying a boy; and who, as president, slept with his bodyguard.

From historical records, one can conclude that Lincoln enjoyed sleeping with men. He did so when it was acceptable in youth and poverty, and also when he was older and successful. While it is documented that Lincoln slept with several men, there is only one confirmed woman who shared his bed — Todd.

Of the men, we don’t know how many reciprocated with emotion. To find one same-sex soul mate in the culture of the 1800s seems a miracle; Lincoln may have sought others when Speed went on to have the life that was expected of men of the time. In that period, only one man in 300 did not marry. 

And Speed was apparently the love of his life. Lincoln resisted marriage as long as he could, only marrying after Speed was well-entrenched in his own marriage — a phase that coincided with Lincoln’s “mental distress.”

The debate - and denial of some - will continue.  Personally, I find it sad that many are afraid to embrace accurate history because it disturbs the neat little patterns they like in their world view.  An unrelated example is a 1960 book on the generalship of Alexander the Great written by military historian British General J.F.C. Fuller (among other things, his awards included Order of the Bath, Order of the British Empire, Distinguished Service Order) who while lauding Alexander's generalship, statesman ship and political acumen has a near conniption fit over the suggestion that Alexander was what we would now consider gay.  Like Lincoln, the love of Alexander's life was Hephastion, a male friend and lover who for a time ranked only below Alexander in Alexander's imperial regime.   One has to wonder about the reflex reaction of those who prefer to protect their prejudices rather than embrace the truth and accurate history.

Today's GOP: The Modern day Party of Jefferson Davis

I note frequently my dismay with what has become of the Republican party.  It has gone from the party of Abraham Lincoln to the modern day equivalent of the party of Jefferson Davis.  Equally upsetting is the manner in which it has embraced ignorance and out right insanity.  Yes, there are educated and intelligent Republicans, but they have yielded control of the party to crazy people, religious fanatics and out right flaming racists.  A piece in Addicting Information, which cites a Washington Post piece that I previously noted that lays out the case of how the GOP has become the party of racist secessionists Here are excerpts:

If Abraham Lincoln were alive today, he would not only find his beloved Republican Party unrecognizable, he would find himself unwelcome in it.

That’s because the Republican Party has abandoned its liberal roots for the conservatism that once dominated the Democratic Party, thus resembling the party of Confederate president Jefferson Davis more than it does the party of Lincoln.

Even the Washington Post understands this devolution of the party. . . . .  the Post goes on to explain why the Republican Party is something Jefferson Davis would approve of.

After the war ended, the South held on to a general animosity and hatred of African-Americans. No longer able to enslave them, southerners found other ways to oppress them.

The subjugation of and violence against African Americans continued apace, particularly after U.S. Army troops withdrew from the South at the end of Reconstruction. Black voting was suppressed. The Southern labor system retained, in altered form, its most distinctive characteristic: unfree labor.

Indeed, today’s Republican Party support voter suppression efforts that are primarily aimed at minority voters to keep themselves in power. And with the backing of many corporations, the GOP has fought relentlessly to kill minimum wage laws and regulations that protect workers, while strangling labor unions that stand up for workers’ rights.

The Washington Post describes how New York-based traders and investors held “pro-Southern sentiment,” and that this tie continues to the present day.

In other words, the Republican Party and Southern-based corporations have teamed up to bring back a new form of American slavery to the landscape that has created an endless circle of poverty while giving white conservatives the opportunity to re-establish old forms of oppression aimed at the African-Americans they so despise.

Conservatives have made an effort to suppress the black vote for the benefit of white Republicans who want to guarantee that white men will always be in power. This strategy has been particularly obvious since President Obama became the first African-American commander-in-chief. Conservatives think President Obama is somehow not intelligent enough to lead our nation because he doesn’t agree with their policies, just as they think African-Americans aren’t smart enough to vote because they don’t vote for Republicans. Of course, conservatives are doing this while at the same time claiming that they aren’t racist or hateful.

However, if you thought this strategy is new, think again. Once again, Robert E. Lee is a central figure here. As a conservative in the 1860s, Lee and other former Confederates supported the same kind of rhetoric that conservatives use today to defend their own voter suppression efforts.

However, if you thought this strategy is new, think again. Once again, Robert E. Lee is a central figure here. As a conservative in the 1860s, Lee and other former Confederates supported the same kind of rhetoric that conservatives use today to defend their own voter suppression efforts.

In a letter drafted by Lee ally and friend Alexander Stuart endorsing the Democratic opponent of Ulysses Grant for president in 1868, he argues that the South has no desire whatsoever to oppress black people only to then declare that white people should be in control of government because African-Americans aren’t intelligent enough to vote or participate in the governance of the country. Lee signed this letter along with other former Confederates, and frankly, it sounds exactly like something a Republican would write today.

Jefferson Davis would be proud to endorse the Republican Party today. In fact, he’d probably even be asked to lead it with Lee as second in command. The GOP harbors racism and is funded by corporate greed. And this marriage between conservatives and corporations is destroying America as we know it, turning it into an oligarchy laced with theocracy as both seek absolute power.

As the Post concludes,

Fueled by the mega-donations of the mega-rich, today’s Republican Party is not just far from being the party of Lincoln: It’s really the party of Jefferson Davis. It suppresses black voting; it opposes federal efforts to mitigate poverty; it objects to federal investment in infrastructure and education just as the antebellum South opposed internal improvements and rejected public education; it scorns compromise. It is nearly all white. It is the lineal descendant of Lee’s army, and the descendants of Grant’s have yet to subdue it.

The question is, are the descendants of Grant’s Army ready and willing to fight back?

I increasingly wonder how decent, moral people can remain Republicans.  The Christofascists, a majority of whom in my view are racists as well, have total infected the GOP liker a fast spreading cancer. 

How the GOP Stopped Caring About Average Americans

A piece in the Washington Post looks at the descent of the Republican Party from a party that pushed progressive measures to one that rejects knowledge - indeed, the embrace of ignorance is now deemed a virtue - and seeks to undo so many of the policies the party once championed.  My family members were Republicans for generations largely because of the party's moderate social positions and respect for knowledge and logic.  Now, none of us are Republicans because the GOP now stands for the opposite of what it once did.  On top of that, the GOP is now the party of open racism. Here are column highlights:

In 1862 , in the midst of the Civil War, Republican Justin Smith Morrill stood in Congress to defend his party’s invention: an income tax . The government had the right to demand 99 percent of a man’s property, the Vermont representative thundered. If the nation needs it, “the property of the people . . . belongs to the government .” The Republican Congress passed the income tax — as well as a spate of other taxes — and went on to create a strong national government. By the time the war ended, the GOP had invented national banking , currency and taxation; had provided schools and homes for poor Americans; and had freed the country’s 4  million slaves.

A half-century later, when corporations dominated the economy and their owners threw their weight into political contests, Theodore Roosevelt fulminated against that “small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power.” Insisting that America must return to “an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him,” the Republican president called for government to regulate business, prohibit corporate funding of political campaigns, and impose income and inheritance taxes. 

In the mid-20th century, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower recoiled from using American resources to build weapons alone, warning, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” He called for government funding for schools, power plants, roads and hospitals.

Like Lincoln and Roosevelt before him, Eisenhower adhered to the classic Republican view of government and set out to use it to guarantee economic opportunity in the postwar world. He cut regulations and price controls for certain businesses, but vetoed laws he thought unfairly favored businessmen and endorsed an upper income-tax bracket of 91 percent. Under his direction, Congress invested in education and infrastructure: The 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act remains one of the largest public-works programs in history. He defended the right to economic opportunity for every hard-working American, putting government muscle behind desegregation. During Eisenhower’s administration, the middle class expanded, and the country thrived. 

But business leaders who hated government regulation insisted that Eisenhower’s policies were tantamount to communism.  They pointed to desegregation as proof that the government was redistributing tax dollars to undeserving minorities, and their mingling of racism and communist fears won votes. By the 1970s, in an uncanny echo of the 1890s and the 1920s, Republican economists had embraced the old idea that only deregulation and unfettered capitalism would create wealth, which would then trickle down to everyone.

After 1980, the government slashed taxes and social welfare spending, even as it boosted defense spending, and once again, wealth stratified. Between 1979 and 2008, the after-tax income of the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans grew 275 percent. By 2007, the top fifth of American earners made more than the other four-fifths combined. 

Perhaps with the influx of young people, immigrants and minorities into the voting population, the cycle can finally be broken. These voters are too young to remember the Cold War and are more comfortable across ethnic lines, making it harder to rally them with the specters of socialism or racial conflict. Forced to adapt to a changing nation, in this century, perhaps, the Republican Party will find a way to stay committed to the ideals of its founders.

Bring Back the Party of Lincoln

If one knows the full history of the Republican Party it quickly becomes apparent that today's GOP is an ugly aberration away from what the party once stood for.  Fueling the GOP's decline into something ugly, as I have argued before, have been the Christofascists, many of whom are the modern day descendants of racist Southern whites and white supremacists who are terrified at what they perceive to be the loss of white privilege.  The GOP has transformed from a party of fiscally conservative, socially moderate country club Republicans to a party of religious extremists, robber barons and what my New Orleans belle grandmother would have deemed poor white trash.   A piece in the New York Times seeks to remind us of what the GOP once was and argues that the party needs to return to its roots.  Here are excerpts:

FOR all the differences between establishment Republicans and Tea Party insurgents, their various efforts to rebrand the Grand Old Party tend to start from a common premise: the belief that Ronald Reagan was the quintessential Republican, and that his principle of defending wealth and the wealthy should remain the party’s guiding vision.

In doing so, they misunderstand the party’s longer history. They would do better to look to earlier presidents, and model their new brand on the eras when the Republican Party opposed the control of government by an elite in favor of broader economic opportunity.

The history of the Republican Party is marked by vacillation between its founding principle of opportunity and its domination by the wealthy elite. The party came together in the 1850s in opposition to the wealthy slaveholders who controlled the federal government. Democrats acting on their behalf insisted that America’s primary principle was the Constitution’s protection of property, and they pushed legislation to let planters monopolize the country’s resources at the expense of the working class.

Abraham Lincoln and others recoiled from the idea of government as a prop for the rich. In organizing the Republican Party, they highlighted the equality of opportunity promised in the Declaration of Independence and warned that a healthy economy depended on widespread prosperity. Northerners and hardscrabble Westerners flocked to that vision, and elected Lincoln to the White House in 1860.

Even as the Civil War raged, Republicans made good on their promise: They gave farmers their own land, created public colleges, funded a transcontinental railroad, took control of the national currency away from rich bankers, and ended slavery. To pay for their initiatives, they invented national taxes, including the income tax. The middle class grew, and the North and West, regions covered by the new programs, boomed.

But as soon as the war ended, wealthy Americans joined with those who hated African-Americans and immigrants to insist that slaveholders had been right: Permitting poor men to have a say in government had produced policies that redistributed wealth. Only a few years after building a federal system that cleared the way for equal opportunity, Republicans faced a racist and xenophobic backlash against an active government — and they folded. 

In 1893, the economy crashed, and too few Americans had enough purchasing power to revive it. Lincoln had been right: Government that served the wealthy would ruin the country.

The party responded, and a new Republican Party emerged from the Panic of 1893, rededicated to Lincoln’s vision. Led by Theodore Roosevelt, the progressive Republicans recognized that government had to address the systemic inequalities of industrialization or no man could rise.

They cleaned up the cities, promoted public education, protected workers and regulated business. Their policies fed a strong and growing middle class; their vision resurrected the Republican Party.

It took a new leader who would embrace Lincoln’s principles to return the party to health. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s experiences in World War II convinced him that the only way to prevent the rise of dictators was to promote economic equality around the world. He used the government to desegregate American schools, promote higher education and start the largest public works program in American history, the 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act.

The consequences were predictable: After Reagan’s 1980 election, economic stability turned into the Great Divergence, in which wealth moved steadily upward. In 2008, the economy crashed.

Twice in its history, the Republican Party regained its direction and popularity after similar disasters by returning to its original defense of widespread individual economic success. The same rebranding is possible today, if Republicans demote Reagan from hero to history and rally to a leader like Lincoln, Roosevelt or Eisenhower — someone who believes that the government should promote economic opportunity rather than protect the rich.

Yes, re-branding is possible, but I do not see how sane, decent people can easily re-brand a party whose base is controlled mostly by extremists and those most motivated by their hatred of others.  I don't see anyone among today's GOP leaders up to the challenge.

The Disruptive Force of Equality

At the time that the Declaration of Independence was penned, the concept embodied by the words "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" were foreign concepts around the entire globe.  Most nations were ruled by monarchies or were colonies of nations ruled by monarchies.  Indeed, it would be another 143 years before most of the European monarchies which were the norm in 1776 were to fall in the aftermath of World War I.   Worse yet, slavery still existed in many parts of the globe, including in America itself.  One might wonder whether or not Thomas Jefferson who slipped the language into the Declaration fully foresaw the power of his selected language or the difficulty which America would encounter in delivering on the lofty concept.  Today's struggle for LGBT equality is but the latest installment on America's journey to live up to the Declaration principles.  A column in the Washington Post looks this difficulty journey which, ironically, is being impeded most by the Christofascists, Tea Party set and today's Republican Party who claim to cherish American ideals.  Here are excepts:

On July 9, 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was publicly read to the citizens of New York City — “We hold these truths to be self-evident . . .” — they responded by decapitating an equestrian statue of King George III, cutting off his nose and placing his head on a spike outside a tavern. Metal from the statue was later turned into 42,088 bullets, intended, by one account, “to assimilate with the brains” of the British.

The “glorious cause” split the fledgling country roughly into thirds — patriots, the uncommitted and loyalists (who sometimes were roughly treated). The Civil War was not the first American conflict that divided families. William Franklin, Ben’s illegitimate son, was the last royal governor of New Jersey. His father disinherited him. 

And the ideals of the new nation were immediately rendered hypocritical by the presence of about 600,000 enslaved human beings. The British took full (and appropriate) propaganda advantage. “How is it,” said Samuel Johnson, “that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”

Yet one of those slave owners, Thomas Jefferson — bookish, retiring, possessing what John Adams called a “happy talent for composition” — injected a philosophic statement into a protest movement: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” 

America could have declared itself independent from Britain without declaring all men equal. The various “injuries and usurpations” relating to the traditional rights of Englishmen would have been enough. But something more ambitious and universal got planted. 

The seed lay dormant for decades. . . .  While Lincoln had little respect for Jefferson as a political figure, he praised him for “the coolness, forecast and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document an abstract truth . . . and so to embalm it there, that today, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.” 

Because Jefferson inserted an abstract truth into a bloody, fratricidal struggle, Lincoln could claim the mantle of the Founders during a bloodier struggle, essentially refounding the country on the best interpretation of its principles. After a further century of African American suffering, striving and demand, Lyndon Johnson could sign the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and hand a pen to Martin Luther King Jr. Slowly, awkwardly, America was learning to understand its own language. 

This story justifies a mix of realism and idealism. Our advance toward the ideals of the Declaration has been protracted, violent and often hypocritical. And yet: All men are created equal. The phrase is enough to cause a catch in the throat.

The idea of equality still drives people to amazing, almost irrational, sacrifices. It remains the most disruptive, hopeful force of history: All men are created equal. Just a whisper of the words is enough to cause humble people to sacrifice everything; enough to cause tyrants to fear. 

This is not, in the end, just an American language. Shortly before his death, Jefferson reflected that the Declaration was “pregnant with our own, and the fate of the world.” A difficult delivery, no doubt. But long expected.

The take away?  That it is those who continue to decry immigrants, those who oppose LGBT equality, and those who still hold segregationist beliefs that are the betrayers of America's founding principles, not the targets of their hate and animus.

The GOP Needs to Stop Being Anti-Government

The far right base of the Republican Party views government as an evil and would dismember it - at least until they suddenly find themselves needing its programs such as social security and Medicare.  And in the process of dismantling government these people care nothing for the fact that (i) there are some functions that only government can do and (ii) countless people would be thrown on the trash heap if programs were cut so that the greed of the far right could be satisfied.  The latter result underscores that for all the religiosity of the Christofascists, they are anything by followers of the Gospel message.  Instead, they are modern day Pharisees of the worse ilk.  Moreover, as a piece in the Washington Post by a conservative writer points out, their agenda is NOT consistent with what the Founding Fathers envisioned.  Here are column highlights:

A political backlash has commenced within the Republican Party against tea party and libertarian groups that have limited interest in securing Republican victories and majorities. Elected leaders, party officials and business groups have begun pushing back against self-destructive legislative strategies and unelectable primary candidates. 

But the GOP’s political reaction often concedes a great deal of ideological ground to anti-government populism — what its advocates describe as “constitutionalism.” 

This cedes too much. In a new essay in National Affairs, “A Conservative Vision of Government,” Pete Wehner and I argue that the identification of constitutionalism with an anti-government ideology is not only politically toxic; it is historically and philosophically mistaken.

It is not enough to praise America’s Founders; it is necessary to listen to them. The Federalist Founders did not view government as a necessary evil. They referred to the “imbecility” of a weak federal government (in the form of the Articles of Confederation) compared to a relatively strong central government, which is what the Constitution actually created. Though they feared the concentration of too much power in one branch of government, they believed that good government was essential to promote what they called the “public good.” 

And they assumed that the content of the public good would shift over time. “Constitutions of civil government,” argued Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 34, “are not to be framed upon a calculation of existing exigencies, but upon a combination of these with the probable exigencies of ages. . . . Nothing, therefore, can be more fallacious than to infer the extent of any power, proper to be lodged in the national government, from an estimate of its immediate necessities. There ought to be a CAPACITY to provide for future contingencies as they may happen.”

In the tradition of the Federalist Founders, Abraham Lincoln believed the federal government should be capable of adjusting to changing circumstances and active in pursuit of national purposes. In his “Fragment on Government,” Lincoln described a number of matters requiring the “combined action” of government, including “public roads and highways, public schools, charities, pauperism” and “providing for the helpless young and afflicted.” 

Conservatives naturally want to be seen as defenders of the Constitution. But “constitutional conservatives” need to recognize what both the Federalist Founders and Lincoln actually envisioned for the republic they respectively created and preserved. Far from being constrained by the political and economic arrangements of an 18th-century coastal, agrarian republic, the Founders fully expected the United States to spread across a continent, undergo economic and social change and emerge as a global actor. And they purposely designed a constitutional system that could accommodate such ambitions.

[T]hey placed few limits on the public policies that durable majorities might adopt in the future — leaving “a capacity to provide for future contingencies.”

In our time, durable majorities have endorsed the existence of Social Security and Medicare. These roles of government were not envisioned by the Founders. But they do not violate a principle of our system nor run counter to the prescient mind-set of the Founders. 

The broad purposes of the modern state — promoting equal opportunity, providing for the poor and elderly — are valid within our constitutional order. But these roles are often carried out in antiquated, failing systems. The conservative challenge is to accept a commitment to the public good while providing a distinctly conservative vision of effective, modest, modern government.

But a shift in mind-set is first required among conservatives: thinking of government as a precious national institution in need of care and reform. This would honor the Founders. The real Founders.

Will this sound reasoning resonate with the far right?  Probably not since the mindset of the far right is based on greed, hate and clinging to writings of ignorant, uneducated Bronze Age herders who never could have imagined the modern world.  Those who embrace ignorance in a celebratory manner will never accept sound and rational reasoning.