Who are today’s Tea/GOP fundamentalists kidding about our history?
This is a Greco-Roman nation, gathered in a Hodenosaunee (Iroquois) longhouse.
The geniuses of our birth---notably Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Adams and Paine---were vehemently non-Christian liberal humanists. At the grassroots our nation was filled with anti-corporate sexual adventurers, free thinkers and hemp advocates. If literally alive today, they would induce howls of hatred from the Tea/GOP’s corporate core of Puritan faux patriots.
Our true founders were mostly free-thinking farmers, sailors, artisans and intellectuals---many of them radical Deists---whose ideals derived from Greece and Rome, five centuries before Jesus. Their love of freedom was inspired and guided by Native Americans whose confederation was the model for our Constitution.
Who are today’s Tea/GOP fundamentalists kidding about our history?
This is a Greco-Roman nation, gathered in a Hodenosaunee (Iroquois) longhouse.
The geniuses of our birth---notably Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Adams and Paine---were vehemently non-Christian liberal humanists. At the grassroots our nation was filled with anti-corporate sexual adventurers, free thinkers and hemp advocates. If literally alive today, they would induce howls of hatred from the Tea/GOP’s corporate core of Puritan faux patriots.
Our true founders were mostly free-thinking farmers, sailors, artisans and intellectuals---many of them radical Deists---whose ideals derived from Greece and Rome, five centuries before Jesus. Their love of freedom was inspired and guided by Native Americans whose confederation was the model for our Constitution.
Our tradition of direct voting, still alive in many New England towns, where the Revolution was born, was conceived in Athens, 508 BC. The Republic (“if you can keep it,” as Franklin warned) came from Rome, 509 BC. Our federal structure was based on the Iroquois Confederacy, born at latest 1540 AD, through which diverse nations sustained a functioning democracy for at least 250 years, still longer than the US has been in existence. The matriarchal Hodenosaunee were defined by a love of nature and communal land stewardship. Open dialog was as easily accepted as abortion and homosexuality.
Today’s Tea/GOP neo-Puritans are enraged by Franklin’s style of open, joyous sexual adventurism (though many of them practice it in secret). Jefferson fathered at least five children with his slave Sally Hemings, thirty years his junior. Some were conceived while he lived “alone” in the White House.
Our core founders had no time for the Christian faith. It is by intelligent design that Jesus appears nowhere in the Constitution. Its authors’ Deism said a Creator got the universe going, installed the laws of nature, endowed humans with free will, then left. Franklin’s disdain for church services spices his autobiography. Jefferson clipped all references to a divinity for Jesus out of his personal Bible. Paine’s Age of Reason is the ultimate attack on institutional religion. Madison’s First Amendment enshrines disdain for an official church. Various forms of parallel Unitarianism were shared by presidents two through six, including two Adamses, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe.
Their system of checks and balances was based on the Socratic proposition that with the freedom to dialog, human reason will prevail. Thus the First Amendment’s very first phrase exalts freedom from Religion, ie separation of church and state, a phrase coined by Jefferson, demanded by the new nation as a whole.
Like virtually all other American farmers, Washington and Jefferson loved raising hemp, from which they profited greatly. Franklin owned a paper mill that ran on it. All may well have smoked its psycho-active cousin, now known as marijuana. If you told them the nation they founded would make this age-old plant illegal, they would laugh at you.
They’d be equally horrified to hear today’s media-hyped Tea/GOP claiming them as allies in a church/state crusade for repression and empire.
Today’s Tea/GOP is an unholy fusion of theocratic authoritarianism---which our Founders hated above all---and corporate tyranny, whose tea they threw in Boston harbor.
America’s Foxist media loves the lie that the Tea/GOP really reveres the Enlightenment Deists who made our Revolution.
In fact, they would be the bitterest of enemies.
The Greco-Roman/Hodenosaunee thinkers who made the early U.S. would hate today’s Tea/GOP corporate crusade for what it is---the reincarnation of the East India Tea Company, the ultimate hit squad for old King George and his imperial Redcoats.