The New Republic has published an article by someone named Brook Wilensky-Lanford under the headline "The Dangerous Lies We Tell About America's Founding". When I saw the story, I could not resist reading it; after all, I wanted to hear about these terrible lies that are supposedly being told.
The article was a letdown. According to Wilensky-Lanford (the name itself should have been a clue that what was coming was a polemic and not a rational discussion), it was wrong to date the start of the American Revolution to Lexington and Concord in 1775, because Massachusetts farmers had revolted against the British in 1774. Supposedly, using the later date is dangerous and it led in part to the lack of support for the Occupy Wall Street movement of a few years ago. I am not making this up; Wilensky-Lanford actually says this. Next, it was also wrong to use the Battle of Yorktown as the end of the Revolutionary War. Nearly 400 people died in the next two years before the peace treaty was signed (according to Wilensky-Lanford), and this supposedly resulted in battles with Native Americans.
These hardly seem like dangerous lies. Then we got to the big stuff. It seems that according to Wilensky-Lanford, the founders were not really Christians. I will not thrill you with the details of her view, since the real point of the article is then reached. Here is how Wilensky-Lanford puts it:
Since 1997, the right has been making a coordinated and persistent effort to pass varieties of a species of law that redefines the term “religious liberty” in a way that is directly contradictory to this understanding of the founders' intentions. Rhetorically, these laws just provide extra protection for the freedom of religion and apply to everyone, be they evangelical, Catholic, Spiritualist or Bahai. But in practice, as observers in the 18 states that have passed variants of the law have noted, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act would allow people to claim religious exemptions from all kinds of laws meant to protect everybody.
This indeed is a dangerous lie. The problem, of course, is that it is a lie told by Wilensky-Lanford. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act by which she is so horrified is not being passed by the "right". It was first passed by Congress in 1993 at a time when both the House and the Senate were firmly controlled by the Democrats. It was then signed by Bill Clinton, another Democrat. The various state laws that she discusses use the exact language of the federal statute and apply it to the individual states.
See, the problem is that the left cannot tolerate true religious freedom. The Constitution guarantees freedom of religion; the left wants to read that as freedom FROM religion. But there is no doubt that the founders and those who lived for the next two centuries understood that Americans were free to practice their religions as they saw fit. That included the right not to believe, but it did not include the right to deny others their beliefs. It is a pernicious lie to argue otherwise.
The article was a letdown. According to Wilensky-Lanford (the name itself should have been a clue that what was coming was a polemic and not a rational discussion), it was wrong to date the start of the American Revolution to Lexington and Concord in 1775, because Massachusetts farmers had revolted against the British in 1774. Supposedly, using the later date is dangerous and it led in part to the lack of support for the Occupy Wall Street movement of a few years ago. I am not making this up; Wilensky-Lanford actually says this. Next, it was also wrong to use the Battle of Yorktown as the end of the Revolutionary War. Nearly 400 people died in the next two years before the peace treaty was signed (according to Wilensky-Lanford), and this supposedly resulted in battles with Native Americans.
These hardly seem like dangerous lies. Then we got to the big stuff. It seems that according to Wilensky-Lanford, the founders were not really Christians. I will not thrill you with the details of her view, since the real point of the article is then reached. Here is how Wilensky-Lanford puts it:
Since 1997, the right has been making a coordinated and persistent effort to pass varieties of a species of law that redefines the term “religious liberty” in a way that is directly contradictory to this understanding of the founders' intentions. Rhetorically, these laws just provide extra protection for the freedom of religion and apply to everyone, be they evangelical, Catholic, Spiritualist or Bahai. But in practice, as observers in the 18 states that have passed variants of the law have noted, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act would allow people to claim religious exemptions from all kinds of laws meant to protect everybody.
This indeed is a dangerous lie. The problem, of course, is that it is a lie told by Wilensky-Lanford. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act by which she is so horrified is not being passed by the "right". It was first passed by Congress in 1993 at a time when both the House and the Senate were firmly controlled by the Democrats. It was then signed by Bill Clinton, another Democrat. The various state laws that she discusses use the exact language of the federal statute and apply it to the individual states.
See, the problem is that the left cannot tolerate true religious freedom. The Constitution guarantees freedom of religion; the left wants to read that as freedom FROM religion. But there is no doubt that the founders and those who lived for the next two centuries understood that Americans were free to practice their religions as they saw fit. That included the right not to believe, but it did not include the right to deny others their beliefs. It is a pernicious lie to argue otherwise.
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