With Friday’s historic overturning of Roe v Wade, leftists are again vacillating between claiming that constitutional rights are being eroded and averring that the Constitution should be irrelevant. One writer doing the latter is The Root’s Candace McDuffie, with a Sunday title reading “The Constitution Was Literally Written By Slaveowners. Why Is America Obsessed With Upholding It?”
Aside from observing that leftists have an odd affinity for the word “literally,” one could note that the writer’s question equates to asking: Why is America obsessed with upholding the law? For the Constitution is the supreme law of our land.
McDuffie’s commentary might not warrant mention had Microsoft Network not chosen to post her article to its homepage. This reflects a serious problem liberal psychologist Robert Epstein warned of in recent years: By controlling the flow of information, Big Tech can, uh, literally(!) shift 15 million votes toward a candidate and thus choose our leaders. (Note: The New American has almost assuredly never graced MSN.com’s homepage). Thus does McDuffie’s misconceptions matter.
As to this, she writes:
Last week, the Supreme Court eviscerated a woman’s right to abortion, undermined Miranda rights, expanded gun rights and allowed border patrol agents to operate with even further impunity. Today, it ruled that a former Washington state high school football coach can pray on the field immediately after games—regardless of the religious backgrounds of the students.
The mostly conservative justices are using the Constitution as a smoke screen for their rulings — which will continue to demolish even more human rights. The governing document was constructed during the Constitutional Convention that occurred in Philadelphia from May 5, 1787 to September 17, 1787.
The primary authors consisted of: John Adams, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. The last two men on that list owned slaves. How can this set of laws still guide a nation when it was concocted by white men who looked at Black people as property and not as human?
First, McDuffie makes a few bush-league factual errors. For starters, the Constitutional Convention began on May 25, 1787, not May 5. Second, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine weren’t actual “authors” of our national constitution; Adams penned the Massachusetts Constitution, Paine helped author the French Constitution, while Jefferson wrote The Declaration of Independence. Perhaps McDuffie is alluding to influence those men’s ideas likely had on Madison, but that isn’t what she says.
Third, McDuffie also claims, and laments, that seven of today’s nine SCOTUS justices were nominated by Republican presidents, who’ve only won the popular vote once in the last 30 years. (She then suggests the Electoral College’s elimination.) In reality, six sitting justices were chosen by GOP presidents. Justices Elena Kagan and Sonya Sotomayor were elevated by Barack Obama, while Stephen Breyer was nominated by Bill Clinton.
This matters because if someone is too lazy to ferret basic facts out, he likely won’t well perform the harder task of properly reasoning things out.
McDuffie fits this bill, too, further stating that while the 15th Amendment gives blacks voting rights, this is illusory because many states have enacted voter-integrity laws, which she calls “restricted access” (true that: They restrict access to legal voters). She then says that “mass incarceration” puts the lie to the 13th Amendment’s abolishment of slavery and involuntary servitude.
McDuffie proceeds to write, wholly lacking self-awareness, “It’s clear that the right will continue to twist and contort anything they can to carry out their agenda….” Yes, it’s always troubling when people twist facts and reason into policy and law.
While there’s a bit more (and less) to her piece, McDuffie closes by reiterating her thesis. “And honestly,” she writes, “the Constitution will always be a hell of an excuse to oppress Black folks on behalf of white supremacy.”
The writer’s ignorance reflects how remiss our schools and culture have been at teaching civics and how effective they are at cultivating misguided emotion. Slavery propaganda is particularly damaging.
In truth, many Founders knew slavery was wrong and combated it strenuously. Jefferson epitomized this. As black professor Thomas Sowell pointed out in his book Black Rednecks and White Liberals (all quotations his):
• Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence first draft included a criticism of King George III for having enslaved Africans and for overriding colonial Virginia’s attempted slavery ban.
• “When Jefferson drafted a state constitution for Virginia in 1776, his draft included a clause prohibiting any more importation of slaves.”
• In 1783, “Jefferson included in a new draft of a Virginia constitution a proposal for gradual emancipation of slaves.”
• In 1784, Jefferson proposed “a law declaring slavery illegal in all western territories.” The “bill lost by one vote, that of a legislator too sick to come and vote.”
• As president, Jefferson urged that Americans be stopped from participating in the violation of Africans’ human rights.
Of course, Jefferson’s efforts were largely stymied, as slavery then was much like abortion today: legal in some states but not others, with conflicting interests contending over, in slavery’s case, an age-old institution status quo the world over. A clearer picture can be gleaned via the audio excerpt of Sowell’s book below.
People clinging to a comic-book conception of history and human nature will dismiss the above. But even if it were true that the Constitution should be discarded because its framers were unrepentant slavers, we could ask: Should the Koran be likewise deep-sixed?
After all, it records the teachings and life of Mohamed, a warlord, bandit, torturer, and committer of massacres — and a slave owner and trader. Don’t lose your head, Miss McDuffie, agonizing over that one.
