Roy Moore in 2011: Getting rid of amendments after 10th would 'eliminate many problems'

[conuly]

Holy shit, just when you thought he couldn't get worse.

Comments

[hamimi_fk]

I've no words for what I just read in this article - I never even heard of some of the things he believes in (false flags??). If this guy gets elected, he's going to make Alabama look extremely scummy forever.

[sovay]

Holy shit, just when you thought he couldn't get worse.

I have no estimated bottom for these people.

[conuly]

I didn't think I did either, but some part of me keeps thinking there must be an end to the depravity.

And his party is trying to be all "Oh, you misunderstand the context" and... there is NO context for "I think we should specifically not have ratified the amendments about ending slavery".

[conuly]

You haven't heard those before?

[sovay]

and... there is NO context for "I think we should specifically not have ratified the amendments about ending slavery".

Nope.

[conuly]

"That would eliminate many problems," Moore replied. "You know people don't understand how some of these amendments have completely tried to wreck the form of government that our forefathers intended."

Yeah, they intended a form of government that allowed them (and I mean that in the personal sense) to own people as property. That is what they intended. Because every last one of them owned slaves and they wanted to keep that party going, no matter that it was inhumane and also really bad, economically, for the entire nation.

[sovay]

Because every last one of them owned slaves and they wanted to keep that party going, no matter that it was inhumane and also really bad, economically, for the entire nation.

It's part of the same false veneration of the past as fundamentalist Christianity: the idea that the way a thing was first codified is not just the right way but the only way and that to alter it is not only presumptuous but sinful, as opposed to recognizing that societies change, civilizations change, languages change, mores change, and it is always a moral action to try to wreck something immoral.

(People who follow this line of thought rarely perceive the past with any clarity, either, which is the part that really burns me, on top of the part where I have to live through them trying to make their retrograde fantasies fact.)

[sabotabby]

The more he talks, the more I'm convinced that there's some kind of GOP competition to be the worst human being on the planet.

[conuly]

They seem to think we all do the same thing, too. This is why they keep trying to debunk evolution by saying that Darwin was wrong about this thing (dinosaurs!) or convince us all abortion is wrong because Sanger (may have been) a racist. It's like, so? Even if dinosaurs still exist or Sanger was a raving bigot, that's got nothing to do with anything. (And if you point out that Washington DID own slaves and DID commit genocide and DID illegally move his slaves between Philadelphia and his plantation so as to avoid having to free them, in compliance with the law, they froth at the freaking mouth. We're not going to dismantle the USA just because our founding fathers had feet of clay, dudes.)

[sovay]

We're not going to dismantle the USA just because our founding fathers had feet of clay, dudes.

Do you think this is a real concern? (Real question. It seems obvious to me, but maybe for people who panic about Confederate monuments, it's not.)

[conuly]

Who the hell is funding the jackpot, and how big is it!?

[conuly]

I think they have a hard time with nuance. They don't get that we can appreciate some things about a person and not others, or that we can be glad for something that exists even if the way it started wasn't so great, or that a person could make mistakes and still be good.

So they have to either ignore the mistakes, or downplay them, or they have to utterly reject everything connected to that person. If George Washington did bad things, then he was a Bad Person. If he was a Bad Person, then everything he did is tainted. They could never be proud again.

It's a weird artifact of authoritarianism and they don't even see how weird it is.

[siderea]

Because every last one of them owned slaves

John Adams has stopped spinning and has simply ripped himself free of his grave and is shambling in your direction.

[siderea]

Boy, this dude is very hung up on the number 10. Do we have any evidence he can count higher than that?

[zyzyly]

And he will probably be elected. This is what hell in a hand basket means.

[conuly]

Okay. Every last one of them except him.

[conuly]

Sure, but he has to take off his pants to make 21.

[siderea]

And Rufus King.

ETA: Oh, and Alexander Hamilton, he was an abolitionist, wasn't he?

ETA2: Wikipedia says Thomas Paine and Sam Adams never owned slaves either.

Sorry, bit of a hobby-horse. I don't mind people saying, "Lots of the founding fathers were terrible, they owned slaves." I object to promulgation of the notion that everybody important back then owned slaves, that there weren't any people of privilege who objected to slavery. It encourages the notion that people back then didn't know better and engaged in slavery because they never heard that it was immoral. Of course they knew better: John Adams told them better. Sometimes, being John Adams, at very great length.

[conuly]

Okay, fair note, I've never even heard of Rufus King. And google suggests that Sam Adams is not one of the people considered to have written the Constitution, which leaves Hamilton and Paine. And Wikipedia says it's debatable whether or not Hamilton was an abolitionist or even owned slaves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Hamilton_and_slavery

[amaebi]

And of course some of them do want to dismantle government as such-- or think they do. They seem to tend to forget about, like, sanitation.

[amaebi]

Koch brothers.

Not much, but in the last round they'll have an actual cage match for finalists in a Secret Exclusive Location and sell tickets, gaining revenues that exceed the reward.

[conuly]

They don't forget. They know that if they didn't have to pay for sanitation, they'd really be filthy, stinkin' rich.

[conuly]

Spoiler: This is all a fantasy.