-By Warner Todd Huston
This week we have two prominent examples proving that liberals are ignoramuses about the Constitution and U.S. history. One incident wholly misunderstood by the left was uttered by the redoubtable Sarah Palin and the other by Christine O’Donnell.
First up Sarah.
In Nevada Sarah Palin kicked off a new tour to spur conservatives and Republicans to the polls just ahead of the midterm elections. During one of her speeches Palin said that conservatives shouldn’t “party like it’s 1773” just yet. We need to keep our shoulder to the wheel and get to the polls first, she warned.
The idiots of the left went wild with Palin’s 1773 date. It proved that Palin was an idiot, they said. Why, the only famous date in our early history is 1776, they chortled. Palin is obviously too stupid to know we became a nation in 1776 they guffawed.
A string of Twitter posts and TV reports streamed from these unschooled leftists attacking Palin for her obvious stupidity.
Of course, these leftist idiots proved themselves illiterate enough not to know that Palin wasn’t referencing the 1776 birth of the nation. Palin was at a Tea Party rally and was referencing the Boston Tea Party… you know, the one that occurred in 1773? Yeah, remember that one?
The second example of the stupidity and historical illiteracy of the left occurred during the debate in Delaware when Christine O’Donnell persisted in asking opponent Chris Coons where in the Constitution it mentions this so-called “separation of church and state”?
The left again went wild saying that O’Donnell is too stupid to know that this separation of church and state is in the First Amendment. The fact is, however, there is no mention whatsoever of a “separation of church and state” in the U.S. Constitution.
In fact the focus on the separation issue is somewhat a historical. The supposed “wall of separation” is not in the First Amendment. It is only mentioned in a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1802 and appears no where else in our founding documents. In fact it doesn’t show up again in our history until the 1940s.
The First Amendment does not employ this separation claim as it is popularly understood in today’s parlance. All the First Amendment says is that Congress cannot make a law establishing a national religion. It says precisely nothing about observing religious practices in government. In fact, this supposed separation issue did not become a national issue until a 1940s era Supreme Court ruling that set that ball rolling.
The reality of the Founder’s intent for the roles of government and religion were far more nuanced and complicated than modern religion banners pretend. Unfortunately, they are presenting an incorrect picture of history and Constitutional law that is damaging the system that the Founders created and materially altering our culture for the worse.
But, once again we see the extreme left ignorant of American history by attacking Christine O’Donnell for what they imagine in their ignorance is her stupid reply to Coons’s misstatement of the issue during the debate.
What we see here is that the left hates our history and traditions so much that they refuse to even learn the truth.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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