Michele Bachmann's pro-slavery mentors.

[RandySF]

NOTE: Reposted from last night because it's worth making sure everyone sees this.

Bachmann’s comment about slavery was not a gaffe. It is, as she would say, a world view. In “Christianity and the Constitution,” the book she worked on with Eidsmoe, her law-school mentor, he argues that John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams “expressed their abhorrence for the institution” and explains that “many Christians opposed slavery even though they owned slaves.” They didn’t free their slaves, he writes, because of their benevolence. “It might be very difficult for a freed slave to make a living in that economy; under such circumstances setting slaves free was both inhumane and irresponsible.”

While looking over Bachmann’s State Senate campaign Web site, I stumbled upon a list of book recommendations. The third book on the list, which appeared just before the Declaration of Independence and George Washington’s Farewell Address, is a 1997 biography of Robert E. Lee by J. Steven Wilkins.

Wilkins is the leading proponent of the theory that the South was an orthodox Christian nation unjustly attacked by the godless North. This revisionist take on the Civil War, known as the “theological war” thesis, had little resonance outside a small group of Southern historians until the mid-twentieth century, when Rushdoony and others began to popularize it in evangelical circles. In the book, Wilkins condemns “the radical abolitionists of New England” and writes that “most southerners strove to treat their slaves with respect and provide them with a sufficiency of goods for a comfortable, though—by modern standards—spare existence.”

African slaves brought to America, he argues, were essentially lucky: “Africa, like any other pagan country, was permeated by the cruelty and barbarism typical of unbelieving cultures.” Echoing Eidsmoe, Wilkins also approvingly cites Lee’s insistence that abolition could not come until “the sanctifying effects of Christianity” had time “to work in the black race and fit its people for freedom.”




http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/08/15/110815fa_...

[FiveGoodMen]

1. Radical XTians are the greatest threat to America

They are the number one enemy.

[RandySF]

3. I remember hearing this crap when I was a kid.

Some of my parents' church friends said this (my not-so-tolerant parents agreed). Now I know where it came from.

[nxylas]

2. If you've lived in the South, you'll know they're still pretty pissed off about emancipation

(By "they", I mean the so-called "Southern patriot" movement). Few will actually come right out and say so, but the dog-whistles are ever present.

[SpartanDem]

4. I'm knew this woman a loon

but with all this stuff coming out foudation of her views takes it to another level

[Scurrilous]

5. K & R

:thumbsup: