Dakota Beacon

Calling the U.S. Constitution "The Commandments" may seem like something that an overly enthusiastic, strict interpretationist might do. And that's exactly what Harvard history professor Jill Lepore implies in an article in The New Yorker, titled "The Commandments."

Lepore makes much of the allegedly shoddy treatment dealt the actual document in the decades after ratification. People that read her article are supposed to conclude that early Americans didn't think much of the Constitution. In fact, the professor ridicules anyone unenlightened enough to revere the document. Why indeed do conservatives think so highly of the Constitution when people more than two centuries ago didn't give a damn about it?

And yet Lepore's analysis takes a strange turn.

After six paragraphs of arguments that early Americans thought little of the Constitution, Lepore points out, "Pocket constitutions have been around since the seventeen-nineties." Now then, the Constitution was ratified in 1789. So Lepore has inadvertently admitted that only a few years after ratification, people thought enough of what the document meant that they carried around copies.

The contradiction is not Lepore's last use of agenda-driven emotion over fact. Her contempt for anyone who holds the Constitution dear comes screaming through when she writes:

The National Center for Constitutional Studies, founded by W. Cleon Skousen, a rogue Mormon, John Bircher, and all-purpose conspiracy theorist, prints a stapled paper version, the dimensions of a datebook [sic], thirty cents if you order a gross. I got mine, free, at a Tea Party meeting in Boston. Andrew Johnson, our first impeached President, was said to have waved around his pocket constitution so often that he resembled a newsboy hawking the daily paper.

So the only people crazy enough to revere the Constitution are crazy people? Oh, and Tea Partiers too? It's unclear whether or not Tea Partiers and nuts are one in the same in Lepore's mind.

Then the professor injects the obligatory "Constitution lovers are idiots" smear.

Crying constitution is a minor American art form. “This is my copy of the Constitution,” John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, said at a Tea Party rally in Ohio last year, holding up a pocket-size pamphlet. “And I’m going to stand here with the Founding Fathers, who wrote in the preamble, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ ” Not to nitpick, but this is not the preamble to the Constitution. It is the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence.

Granted, Boehner got it wrong--embarrassing for the Speaker of the House. Yet the one-sidedness of Lepore's examples is par for the course in America's institutions of higher learning. Her article ridicules not one inhabitant of the leftwing echo chamber. Lepore aims the venom in one direction.

For 17 paragraphs after the gratuitous smears, Lepore argues convincingly against simply swallowing everything that preachers such as Glenn Beck claim about our Constitution, it's drafters, and its interpretation. But when Lepore then discusses the Second Amendment, she descends into lefty ideology and stays there. The professor advances an argument put forth by a Yale law professor that...

…for much of the twentieth century, legal scholars, judges, and politicians, both conservative and liberal, commonly understood the Second Amendment as protecting the right of citizens to form militias—as narrow a right as the protection provided by the Third Amendment against the government’s forcing you to quarter troops in your house.

Lepore claims that organizations like the NRA were largely responsible for inspiring misinterpretations of the Second Amendment to mean that individuals had the right to bear arms. That's a nasty disfigurement of reality considering that the U.S. Supreme Court has consistently ruled to confirm the individual right to bear arms.

I made it through the rest of Lepore's article by the hardest. The remainder of the Harvard professor's analysis carries the tenor of a hit piece against conservatives. We've come to expect nothing else from the hallowed halls of enlightened, progressive academia.

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© 2011 Chuck Rogér