You don’t seem to be claiming any of the information I bring up is false, just that we have no need to associate the actions of the Founders with the men and tarnish their images.
That is correct. It’s sort of like inquiries into gender or racial differences. Such differences may or may not exist, but nothing good can come of searching for them. But I’d go farther and say that we have a need not to tarnish their images — continued respect for their output.
If the country had moved on and was no longer capable of deeds similar to those of the past
Racism is alive and well in America, but I don’t see the strategic benefit of taking the founders down a notch, when you could instead be arguing that if they were alive today, they would be leading the charge for justice. The idea that a John Jay born in 1945 would be a white nationalist today because the one born in 1745 owned slaves is actually kind of silly. Yet one must make that assumption if Jay’s behavior is to be taken as a measure of his character for purposes of learning from history.
Not all facts about the past are instructive. What, exactly, would change if we acknowledged that every Founder who owned slaves was a despicable human being who should be rotting in Hell? Would the Constitution be more respected? Would the Federalist papers still be our national Talmud? What mistakes, exactly, would you have us not repeat that will be repeated if the Founders’ reputations are left to stand?
I’m trying to be empathetic but I’m afraid it comes across as patronizing. Personal attacks on the founders don’t help us be better people. I can’t imagine anyone’s attitude on race being changed by a pronouncement that slave-owning founders were not “good” men. I believe that you are really engaged in score-settling, that it galls you as a black man to hear anything good said about men who did such a bad thing to your forebears. I don’t deny your anger or your right to it. But there’s a reason we don’t let victims sit on juries or pronounce sentence. And that is what you seem to me to be trying to do.