Subject:
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Re: Santorum Fails In His Effort To Pervert The Constitution
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Tue, 27 Jul 2004 17:01:13 GMT
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Viewed:
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2511 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Dave Schuler wrote:
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I think it’s more accurate to say that our founding fathers believed rights
to be inherent to some people, but they had no problem in accommodating
slavery and the denial of women’s suffrage. These aren’t trifling matters,
either--the founding fathers made a choice, conscious or otherwise, to
include certain groups (by coincidence, predominantly wealthy white male land
owners (then as now, I suppose)) and to exclude others. The rights of those
“others” were certainly alienable.
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To be fair, slaves and women were seen more as property than people by many of
the colonists, and they basically inherited the idea that political rights were
tied to landownership from England. But if you were a white male landowner in
the 1770’s, they considered that certain rights were indeed inalienable to you.
Or at least they said they did. For all we know that could have just been
political posturing as a way of just saying, “We figured out that you only have
as much control over us as we’re willing to give you, so go away now,” while
making it sound more important.
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