Douglas is a treat to read isn’t he? Notice how long paragraphs were back then.

I wonder very much if Douglas would agree with his position if today he could view how so many people view the Constitution like Obama does?

As to there being inspiration in the text? Yes. A thousand times yes. Because it incorporates revealed truth. So I would agree with that, but the text doesn’t work like magic and mean different things in different ages.

Douglas’s states, “I repeat, the paper itself, and only the paper itself, with its own plainly written purposes, is the Constitution.”

But as we can now more plainly view from our vantage point of the future, there is no “plainly written purposes.” Or, stated from my viewpoint, such plainly purposes are vivid only to those who impose the laws of reason and morality upon themselves, those laws which come from God, and more specifically from the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Douglas, may have been safe in his age to rely on the text; he probably would not be so sure in our age, the age when the “men who would be gods,” have usurped all authority and turned everything upside down. These men have declared us all insane and our protests only reinforce their commitment to that view. There can be no debate, in their mind, against their views, and even Douglas’s voice would be scorned. The only sacred and inerrant thing is their own pronouncements.

Douglas lived in an age of reason and these men did not exist then in such numbers as they do now. His argument, therefore, put the slavery question on sure footing for that age. His solution, rather than relying on one side of a dispute about whether or not the Founders opposed slavery, was to look at the text and plainly observe no sane and reasonable man could deny it disallowed slavery. But Douglas did not have to account for the breathtaking and comprehensive possibilities allowed to the truly wicked, the Ubermensch, the one who dares to dispose of all rules and morality. Douglas did not have to combat deconstruction, post modernism, and Orwellian thought control.

We have amongst us those who move in total blackness. God gave to man the very lights of heaven for light, for a reference, for guidance. Now we have those who believe in no light, no guidance, no logic, no truth. They believe in nothing. And in nothing they have found something.

My point remains unchanged, though.

my glance over of it was that it was interesting in its point and was worth further examination. now with your question, i have some work to do to see if i can address it.

thanks for making me think more 🙂

And thus, if we follow the common view, (untaxed) Indians were not people at all. Which appears absurd on its face since some Indians counted as full persons. The assertion of race prejudice in that case stands on shaky ground.

Or, the First Nations Victim Lobby hasn’t done as well at promoting their grievances.

1) The 3/5 rule would discourage slave ownership as there would be less overall representation per population in slave states.

2) The 3/5 rule would encourage slave ownership as there would be more presentation per voter in slave states – more than if slaves weren’t counted at all.

I believe slavery was incompatible with the original Constitution. The country was doomed to civil war from the start.

I’m also prone to “irrational and magical thinking”. I’m convinced our Founders were inspired, if not directly, then indirectly, by the inspired writings of John Locke, Hugo Grotius, Jean-Jacqu­es Burlamaqui, and William Blackstone among others.

Hence, if the Old South feared being swamped by Northern politics all she had to do was free her slaves and gain more House seats pronto.

The ratio of slave to free in some southern states was heavy, so the impact would be substantial.

However, it all happened the very hard way.

I’m not quite sure how Douglas could claim the text plus current interpretation of the Constitution has more verity than the text and the original intent of the Founders. It’s almost as if there is a claim of divine inspiration by Douglas. The text itself becomes divine and assumes a power to become new things, but this seems to be irrational and magical thinking.

I think it much simpler and reasonable to assert that Taney and the prevalent legal opinion he set forth in Dred Scott was simply wrong because it is not text nor the original intent of the Founders. Abraham Lincoln stated something like this in one of his speeches when he noted that the Constitution made provision for the abolition of slavery.

On the first issue of this post, it was UNWISE to read a sanitized version. The attempt to avoid the truth when one is attempting to set forth a truth is generally not successful because credibility is lost. Further, since the idea was to provoke thought and discussion, the whole 3/5’s compromise could have been set forth not on the defensive, but for the truth which it contains.

We’re not laughing at you, we’re laughing with you.

No kidding, great job with the “copy/paste”, I’m sure no one else knows how to do that….

Seriously, keep up the great work.