Tea Party Favorite Shows Her Ignorance -- Again

Michele Bachmann is a Ron Paul acolyte, she is also one of the worst conservatives in Congress. The Tea Party types like to portray themselves as "patriots" and admirers of the Founding Fathers. Yet they regularly show their own ignorance of American history. At least I hope they are ignorant, the alternative is just dishonest. For instance, take when Ron Paul wrote, or had someone write on his behalf:

The notion of rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution, or the writings of the Founding Fathers. On the contrary, our Founders' political views were strongly informed by their religious beliefs. Certainly the drafters of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, both replete with references to God, would be aghast at the federal government's hostility to religion.

Of course the drafter of the Declaration was Jefferson who swore eternal hostility to the concept of rule by the church. Jefferson warned:

Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him [Jesus] by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being.And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerve in the brain of Jupiter.

History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and State. Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity.

As for the Constitution, I dare you to find one mention of any god in the text of the document. The word "replete" beings full of, abundant. Ron Paul presents himself as an expert on the Constitution and yet he apparently never read it or he would realize there are NO references to God in the Constitution.

Numerous reports and news stories have Michele as Ron's new best female friend and someone who is "learning" her history and views from him. I can see that. Given Ron's claim that the Constitution is full of references to God, is not really that much more silly than Bachmann telling an audience in New Hampshire that she loves the state because that is where the American Revolution started at Concord and Lexington. Of course, neither of those two battles were in New Hampshire, both were in Massachusetts.

Let's be honest, the Constitution, for the Tea Party crowd doesn't really mean anything. It is a magic totem that they invoke to justify ANYTHING they believe no matter how out of sync with the Constitution the belief may be.

Consider the anti-immigration bigotry that these "constitutionalists" exhibit all the time. What does the Constitution say about immigration? Actually not much. It says Congress has the power to "establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization," and that's it. Naturalization means citizenship, not immigration.

At the time the Constitution was written, and for more than a century afterwards immigration meant getting on a boat and coming to the United States, no permission slips required. Anyone was free to come to America and Congress could determine how, after they got here, they could become citizens and apply this to all the States, hence a "uniform" rule of naturalization. The only other reference, vaguely I might add, to this is the 14th Amendment.

It says that anyone "born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States...." So, if you were naturalized you are a citizen. And, if you were born in the US, whether your parents are citizens or not, you are a citizen.

Of course, being bigots the Tea Party types dump the Constitution they pretend to worship and either demand unconstitutional end runs around it, or demand that it be changed to reflect their own prejudices. Ron Paul wants the 14th Amendment guarantee, that anyone born in the US is a citizen, to be removed. Some Tea Party Republicans, at the State levels, are saying the States should refuse to issue birth certificates to children of immigrants and to refuse to acknowledge them as citizens. By the way, the constitution also says that those born here are also citizens "of the State wherein they reside."

Bachmann and her fellow Tea Party types claim they venerate our Constitution and our history. Yet they repeatedly show they don't know our history and that they have complete disregard for the Constitution when it suits them. If this is how those who regularly invoke the Constitution behave, just imagine how bad it is with those who actually dislike it. No wonder liberty is sinking fast.