The Constitution: A Love Story

[babylonsister]

http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_constitution_a_love_story

The Constitution: A Love Story
It’s time for liberals to reclaim our founding document from fanatics who worship its name but not its meaning.
Garrett Epps | October 17, 2011

big snip, worth the read//


The far right is now stealing the Constitution in plain sight. I don’t speak here of ordinary conservatives who may differ with me on the scope of the Commerce Power or the meaning of the 11th Amendment but of the Bachmanns, the Perrys, the Pauls (father and son). These charlatans are not being answered as they should be, in part because too many progressives see only the imperfection and shame in the Constitution’s history and blind themselves to the promise of its text.

Last year, on the 37th anniversary of the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom,” the National Mall was filled with participants in Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally. I went to the Mall and stood among the marchers and heard them discussing the horrors of immigration, the “tyranny” of an elected Congress, the rapture of guns, the satanic evil of Barack Obama. I felt a profound disquiet, not least because I spoke to many of them individually and found that these were, by and large, lovely people, Americans from small towns who were, in my judgment, being led astray—fed lies about their history and their Constitution—by people who should know better.

To restore my soul, I left the march and walked to the National Museum of American History, on the north side of the Mall. In a second-floor exhibit hall, the museum displays the original lunch counter from the Woolworth’s store in Greensboro where the first sit-in occurred in 1960. That lunch counter—like the Liberty Bell, the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, the wall atop Cemetery Ridge, Ford’s Theatre, and the Stonewall Inn—is an inescapable part of our constitutional heritage. These physical things tie the words on the Constitution’s page to our lives in a way that we could never reproduce even with the most brilliant new Constitution. These places and objects are outward and visible signs of the inward grace that constitutional faith can sometimes produce, of the transformative potential, present always in American history, of dry words on paper.

I stood in front of the lunch counter and thought of the poisonous twaddle being pushed on the Mall behind me. I think now of the corrosive agenda of the right wing, which in many ways is the same agenda the Constitution’s opponents have followed since 1787: sanctioned inequality, theocracy, localism, xenophobia, legalized exploitation. Today, their hostility masquerades as reverence. They dare to accuse patriots of treason; they demand obeisance to an imagined Constitution; they plot the destruction of the real one.

I made a vow: Let others dream of constitutional conventions. As for me and my house, we will serve this Constitution.