Tornado Alley (PROG)

[F6]

The Christian-Constitution Fairytale

By Brendan Beery
Posted on May 25, 2011

Republican biblical fetishism is matched only by Republicans’ lust for another writing they profess to worship even though few of them have read it: the US Constitution. I teach constitutional law (among other courses) for a living. And every time I teach it, I must take care to disabuse brainwashed students of all their notions about our “Christian” Constitution and our supposedly fundamentalist founders. The right-wing disinformation campaign has been as effective as it has been cynical; a lie repeated often enough can make believers of the unlearned among us.

Salon.com’s Alex Pareene (probably the most gifted young political writer in America) reports [ http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/05/24/cain_gop_constitution_quotes/index.html ],

Republican 2012 front-runner and former pizza mogul Herman Cain invoked America’s founding document at length in his campaign speech this weekend. Unfortunately, he also misidentified it:

"And I know that there are some people that are not going to do that, so for the benefit of those who are not going to read it because they don’t want us to go by the Constitution, there’s a little section in there that talks about “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

That, of course, is not from the Constitution. It’s from the Declaration of Independence.

This news breaks at the same time the HuffingtonPost reports [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/25/tea-party-constitution-week-schools_n_866642.html ],

The Tea Party Patriots, Georgia-based but claiming 1,000 chapters nationally, are instructing members to remind teachers that a 2004 federal law requires public schools to teach Constitution lessons the week of Sept. 17, commemorating the day the document was signed. And they’d like the teachers to use material from the Malta, Idaho-based National Center for Constitutional Studies, which promotes the Constitution as a divinely-inspired document.

Every time a student suggests to me that the Constitution is “divinely inspired” or based on Christianity, I ask simply, “which part?” Without exception, any student asked to identify a provision of the Constitution that is based on Christian doctrine fails to do so. That’s because students possessed of that fantasy haven’t been taught what the Constitution says; they’ve only been taught by assertion [ http://waronignorance.net/05_16_Assertion.html ] that it was based on Jesus’ teachings.

Students sometimes look devastated to hear from a law professor truths about the law starkly at odds with what they’ve been told so many times by their preachers. And naturally, some of them dig in. With more recalcitrant types, I must get more specific. What did Jesus preach about legislative power? What were his positions on the electoral college or the age qualifications for federal office? How about the amendatory process prescribed in Article V? What were Jesus’s opinions about the Full Faith and Credit Clause and interstate commerce?

As Alex Pareene noted [ http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/05/24/cain_gop_constitution_quotes/index.html ] in his article, the Constitution is actually quite a bore—almost as intoxicating as the Old Testament’s interminable expositions about who begat whom. Sometimes a student will say that the Bill of Rights is the part of the Constitution that God inspired (although most Christian-Constitution advocates I encounter don’t know that the Bill of Rights and the Constitution are not two separate documents). Again I ask, which part? The First Amendment’s prohibition of comingling church and state? The right to bear arms? How about the Third Amendment’s proscription of military quartering in private homes? What were Jesus’ teachings about that? What of Jesus’s disposition toward speedy trials, the right to counsel, and unreasonable searches and seizures?

Anyone who has actually read the Constitution (which, happily, law students are required to do) knows precisely what role Jesus played in its drafting: none. Why conservatives want or need to believe otherwise about a document whose function is to structure a government has never been clear to me. Perhaps some of them will comment below?

Copyright 2011 Brendan Beery (emphasis in original(

http://beeryblog.wordpress.com/2011/05/25/the-chistian-constitution-fairytale/ [with comments]

---

(items linked in(:

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=54833454 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=64340913 and preceding and following