For conservatives, the myth is that somehow the Founding Fathers were giants, better than we are today, smarter, more able, more clever. Above all, the conservatives argue that the Founding Fathers were more "moral" than you or me. They were like the Olympian heroes of ancient mythology, at least according to our conservative brethren. But conservatives are always looking backwards and not seeing very clearly. They have problems coping with present realities.

The conservatives want us to accede to those mythical heroes. We are expected to abandon our own good sense and trust the Founding Fathers' judgment over our own.

Of course, most rational persons realize that such political mythology is sheer nonsense, but it begs the question, who were the Founding Fathers and what makes them so great that they're wiser than you are?

The term "Founding Fathers" is somewhat vague. My dictionary says that it didn't even come into use until about 1914. It was applied to the members of the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Our Constitution or what remains of it after 27 of the most serious blunders have been corrected by amendments, rests on the philosophy, genius, morality and ethics of the rather small committee which concocted it. We must look to those Founding Fathers to see what kinds of guys they were that we should surrender our good sense to theirs.

It's important to differentiate the Constitution that the Founding Fathers cooked up from the Bill of Rights. Today when we think of the protections of the American system, we usually think of the shinning example of ethics and goodness contained in the Bill of Rights. These are the first ten amendments to the Constitution. They are primarily the work of George Mason (1725-1792). He would have been a Founding Father because he was a delegate to the convention from Virginia, but he refused to sign the Constitution. He realized that it failed to protect individual liberties and failed to oppose slavery.

Mr. Mason lobbied against adoption of the Constitution just as many of the Founding Fathers lobbied against the Bill of Rights. Most of the Founding Fathers disapproved of giving ordinary citizens such liberties as freedom of religion, freedom from unreasonable search and torture, the right of free speech and so forth. In fact, when John Adams (1735-1826) was president (1797-1801), he took away freedom of speech.

The Bill of Rights is really the people's voice against the Founding Fathers; liberty against conformity.

Present-day conservatives and other right-wing fanatics insist that we (and especially judges) revere the Founding Fathers, sublimating our twenty-first century experience to their own. I have nothing against the Founding Fathers. They weren't so bad, but certainly not so good, either, about like conservative Republicans today. They certainly were NOT representative of the population of the counrty, then or now. If they represented anyone, it was a mere 2% of the population.

• Number of women: 0
• Number of Native Americans: 0
• Number of Hispanics: 0
• Number of Afro-Americans: 0
• Number of poor persons: 0
• Number of indentured servants: 0
• Number of Jews: 0
• Number of non-land owners: 0
• Number of Moslems: 0
• etc., etc.

None of those kinds of persons were considered important enough (then or now) to have a real say in the Constitution or its protections.

Our rather defective Constitution was patched together by the 1787 Constitutional Convention because the earlier Articles of Confederation had flopped as a frame of government. The Articles of Confederation had been written by the rabble-rouser John Dickenson (1732-1805). Even though they failed as a sane basis for a government, Dickenson was right back at the 1787 Constitutional Convention to try his hand again. At least he was smarter that George W. Bush and realized that one has to admit errors and try again.

In 1786 only 9 years after the Articles of Confederation had been tried, the old and powerful families of Virginia put together a committee to meet with delegates from the other states in order to design a better frame of government.

Rhode Island didn't care enough about it to send anybody, but representatives from the other 12 states answered an invitation issued by Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804), a bastard "and illegal alien" living in New York. Ranging in age from the 27 year-old Jonathan Dayton (1760-1824) to the 82 year-old Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) the convention gathered in Philadelphia in May 1787. Altogether, the individual states appointed 65 wealthy men to be Founding Fathers, ten of them didn't bother to show up at the convention. They had important work to do and, maybe a manicure to schedule. So a mere 55 well-to-do gentlemen stopped by for grog and scones in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787. Of those 55, only 39 Founding Fathers actually liked the Constitution enough to sign it. The other 16 visited the many Philadelphia whorehouses and ambled back home.

Things might have turned out differently had Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) not been in Europe. He was one of the few voices of real civil liberty in American. Here are the 39 much-revered Founding Fathers who invented the Constitution, the guys we're supposed to look up to, the guys judges are supposed to worship:

If you wonder why there are so many problems with American politics, look at how many of these guys were lawyers.

How many of these sterling Founding Fathers have you ever heard of before? and you are supposed to follow them blindly? Which ones represent you or the way you live or think? Conservatives who want you to obey these Founding Fathers have very strange morality and don't know what they're talking about.

"I have opinions of my own -
strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them"
George W. Bush, 2004

You are welcome to use or republish any of our material.
Please give www.prisoners.com credit as the source.