When Mitt Romney said to applause at a campaign stop that he thought the U.S. "Constitution is certainly brilliant and probably inspired", I was disgusted. I thought it a dog whistle signal to the Tea Party - not really his opinion, not the opinion of a Harvard Law School grad. Wrong. This sort of thing is part of the Mormon Constitution, as Gary Wills calls it at the New York Review blog. A brilliant Mormon student of Wills's some years ago expressed the same view - describing divine inspiration of the Declaration of Independence as a Mormon position. Indeed Romney's view can be found in the (pre-Civil War) LDS scripture Doctrine & Covenants:
And for this purpose have I established the Constitution of this land, by the hands of wise men whom I raised up unto this very purpose, and redeemed the land by the shedding of blood (D&C 101:80).Perhaps the divine signal was weak when the inspired founders drafted the fugitive slave clause, or awarded white men an extra 3/5 of a vote for every slave owned.
No comments:
Post a Comment