I Don’t Care What the Founding Fathers Wanted
They’re all long dead, let’s leave them that way.
Warning: I use some very strong language in this one because I have some very strong feelings, so if you don’t like swearing, back out now. You’ve been warned.
Look, I want to try to keep this one short because I don’t think there’s a lot to really say about this, even though it’s a very important topic. In part this is because I think a lot of what I want to say has already been said, and in part because it’s so bleedingly simple to me that I don’t understand why it’s controversial.
A lot — and I mean a lot — of people are really hung up on what, precisely, the founding fathers wanted and meant when they wrote the Constitution. Known as “constitutional originalism,” it is the notion that “the constitutional text ought to be given the original public meaning that it would have had at the time that it became law,” according to the National Constitution Center.
I don’t think that I need to explain to someone in this, the 21st century year of 2024, why it is both patently absurd and incredibly dangerous to take this stance. For one, when the original constitution was written, basically the only people whose vote counted were white male landowners.
