John Lofton, the reconstructionist wingnut from the Constitution Party, has an interview with Newt Gingrich, author of a new book called The Creator's Gifts: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, that is rather interesting for a couple reasons. First, because Gingrich doesn't seem to know the difference between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution:
Well, I think it's pretty clear in the original document, the Declaration of Independence of the Founding Fathers, that we are endowed by our Creator certain inalienable rights which are the rights of liberty, life and the pursuit of happiness. And I think what every listener needs to understand is that in the minds of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and the people who wrote that document, they literally meant that your rights come from God, that you then loan them to the government, which is why the Declaration of Independence begins 'We the people...'.
Well no, Newt, the Declaration does not begin with "We the people...", it begins with "When in the course of human events...". One would expect that someone who just wrote a book on the subject would know the difference. Secondly, of course, the three men that he cites - Franklin, Adams and Jefferson - had a very different conception of God than either Gingrich or Lofton. They were all theistic rationalists who rejected all, or nearly all, claims of revelation, including the Bible.
Indeed, I would argue that the notion of unalienable rights is completely foreign to the Bible. Nowhere in the Bible is there any mention whatsoever of the notion of political rights. Indeed, the Bible prescribes punishments for things that simply could not be crimes in this country given our Constitution. As I always point out to those who claim that the Ten Commandments are the "basis of American law", that simply cannot be true when 7 of them would be blatantly unconstitutional in this country (and an 8th would only be constitutional in limited circumstances).
But then there's this fascinating end to the interview, where Lofton actually quotes disapprovingly Gingrich's seemingly innocuous statement that homosexuals can be good people:
Q: Well, my thinking was something like that if people are homosexuals, that tells us something about their character and we care about the character --
A: I don't agree with that.
Q: Oh, I see. Why do you think God calls it an abomination if it says nothing about their character?
A: I think there are many good and kind and decent people who may also be homosexuals.
Q: Really?
A: Yes.
Q: My goodness.
A: And you live in a very narrow world if you've never met one.
And that tells you all you need to know about what a bigoted nut John Lofton is.
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As a believing follower of Christ, I have to agree with you. There is no biblical mandate for a republican democratic form of government. If anything, there has been a call to a theocratic state or an absolute monarch / autarch; with a command to obey the presenting government (Book of Romans). The transcendence of allegiance to God is emphasized over all forms of government.
Nowhere is a statement to the effect that the power of government derives from the consent of the governed. In fact such sentiments would have been anathema and viewed as an opportunity for either anarchy or apostasy!
I would really be interested in hearing more from Gingrich, then about why he acknowledges that homosexuals can be "good and kind and decent people," and should be allowed to teach in school, but yet shouldn't be allowed to adopt children. What do you suppose is his rationale on that-- that being with the kids a mere 6 hours per day is not enough to influence them enough toward the sin of homosexuality?
Gretchen makes an excellent point. I wonder if Gingrich is against gay adoptions? I don't recall ever seeing a specific statement to that effect, but it's not like I keep track of his every statement. Wait, a quick google search turns up this answer to a question from Time magazine:
So indeed, he is against gay adoption while being for gays being allowed to teach school. And your point is a good one.
Gingrich claimed to be an historian, and apparently taught history at an obscure college in Georgia. One might believe that even teachers of history at obscure colleges in Georgia would know the difference between the DoI and the Constitution.
Apparently not.
It's been quite a while since I read Judges, but I seem to recall that God was initially against the whole king thing, preferring that Israel remain leaderless except in times of great need. Is nobody pointing to that to say that it's a sign of God being hip on the representative republic thing? It's a stretch, I know, but what doesn't get all stretchy where religion meets real life?
they literally meant that your rights come from God, that you then loan them to the government,
What do you make of this remark? Is he saying we are handing our rights over to the government to administer? Or is he saying we are loaning our rights to the government to use as its own, so it can pursue life, liberty and happiness? Either way, his interpretation of the DoI is hopelessly flawed. The declaration was written to justify the colonies' breaking away from a tyrannical government, since the colonists had rights given to them by a higher power than the Crown. I hope his book is more logical than his interview was.
Glad to see Newt is not as homophobic as one might have expected though. He kind of put Lofton in his place.
Ed-- he says he's against homosexuals adopting children in the interview to which you link. ;-)
Oh. I must have missed that.
One of the more interesting (also infuriating and disturbing) things about the fundamentalists is their attempt to coopt the Constitution as a religious document. The Constitution is perhaps the purest flowering of Englightenment political thought. A document that begins with "We the People", mentions god not at all, and mentions religion only to tell the government to stay the hell out of it, may justly be called "secular humanist", but it cannot be called Christian.
And yet, they can make statements like this: "Our national Constitution established a republic upon the 'absolute laws' of the Bible, not a democracy based on the changing whims of people."
Whack jobs.
The fact that there are Amendments to the Constitution alone tells you that it is a living document. Let's go back to the founders original intent and throw the Amendments out. Let's start with the 15th, then the 14th - we can devolve from there. When we get the the 21st Amendment (Prohibition repeal)............and let's not forget the other Amendents near and dear to the fundies hearts, marriage, flag burning, abortion, they are proposing a ton of this stuff - you'd think they were trying to change to Constitution or something.
Alan Keyes likes to say that what liberals forget is that our rights are "given to us by God," (as if he'll take them away, or as if we're being ungrateful, or something, if we don't let theocrats run things) and it's disappointing to see Gingrich, who is not a total jackass, buying into it too. The Declaration reads:
We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
This sentence rejects the then prevalent idea that our having rights is contingent on their being bestowed by some agent external to us (like a king, say), rather than their being ours by nature (and thus necessarily). The point of referring to the Creator here is to endorse the latter idea: we have rights simply in being human beings at all. This being the 18th century, the chosen wording is about what we should expect. It's a good choice - forceful, poetic, and yet doctrinally non-committal (between deism and traditional theism). And of course that's why it says "endowed" (which means "provided with some quality," i.e., by nature) rather than "bestowed" (although another meaning for "endowed" is "bequeathed," as in a university endowment, which may be causing some of the confusion here).
But Keyes (and now Newt) misses the point entirely, as if the founders were accepting the original idea (rights bestowed by external agent) and simply changing the agent from king to deity. But that can't be right. For one thing, they would hardly hold such a metaphysically contentious idea to be "self-evident." Indeed, that idea is barely coherent, assuming as it does that making us human and bestowing rights upon us are conceptually distinct things, as if it were possible to be fully human, but without the right to liberty until it was subsequently bestowed upon us (by a wave of His mighty hand - which did what, exactly?). But this is just what the Declaration denies. To be human just is to have the rights in question. They depend on nothing external to us, natural or supernatural. That's what the part about it being "self-evident" is meant to emphasize: that having rights is (metaphysically) necessary for being human. It doesn't say that they couldn't give an argument for that claim, but indicates the kind of argument that it would be if they did give one (if the DoI were a philosophical treatise, which it is not). That argument would not be an appeal to Scripture (which is the very opposite of self-evident, concerned as most of it is with contingent matters of fact), but one concerned with (as Kant would say a few years later, in a different context) "necessity and universality," the marks of the a priori.
Not that I agree with that exactly (that sharp necessary/contingent dualism looks funny nowadays, for starters) but that's what the founders thought.
Also, what SharonB said.
I would say that Newt Gingrich is quite homophobic (at least by my standards). The fact that he appears less so in comparison to Lofton (and has chastised this latter individual for being "narrow") speaks volumes about Lofton. Not a guy I'd like to eat lunch with, I'll tell you that.
Yes, Gingrich is a history professor. It makes his blunders all the more inexcusable.
I've heard that as a professor of history, he favored winning arguments over writing peer-reviewed articles and books. I don't think authority goes to the person who wins the argument.
Authority goes the way of the person who does strong research and thinks coherently enough to express a thesis in relation to it.