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American Jewish Life - Ethics - Poetry - Quote of the Day, American Politics and Life, Ethics, LGBT Rights, Social Justice, Women's Rights
Since Thomas Jefferson is considered by most Americans as an authority on the original intent of the framers of the US Constitution, the conservative wing of the current US Supreme Court and all those fine Republican candidates for President who have claimed in the last week that the majority opinion in the equal marriage decision got it really wrong, I recommend for their consideration this statement of our 3rd President and author of the Declaration of Independence signed exactly 239 years ago today. Perhaps the four justices and Republican candidates will change their minds!?
“Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well; I belonged to it, and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present; and forty years of experience in government is worth a century of book-reading; and this they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead. I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions. I think moderate imperfections had better be borne with; because, when once known, we accommodate ourselves to them, and find practical means of correcting their ill effects. But I know also, that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”
-Thomas Jefferson
Source: Wordsmith.org – A thought for the day
The complete letter in which the above passage is found can be accessed here:
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/letter-to-samuel-kercheval/
Rabbi John Rosove's Blog 
Those very same words would also apply to the bible and should be studied by ‘orthodoxists’ and fundamentalists of all religions. Dr. Bob Newport
Wow!!! I would loved to have been sitting in the gallery when counsel for the appellant read this quote to the justices. Surely nothing else said could pack the power of Jefferson’s words. I fear of course that this was not presented, and seriously doubt Scalia & Co. are on your blog mailing list.
John,
Thanks for posting this statement from President Jefferson. I agree with your sentiments and with the Supreme Court’s clear and correct ruling a week ago that equal protection under the Constitution means marriage equality.
Justice Scalia’s dogged insistence, in his dissenting opinion in the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling and elsewhere, that the framers’ “original intent” (as divined by Scalia) is the sole basis of understanding the Constitution is both wrong and inconsistent with the way the Constitution historically has been interpreted by the Court.
The quotation you posted from Thomas Jefferson has always been one of my favorites, taken from a long letter he wrote 40 years after the Declaration of Independence and more than 30 years after the Constitutional Convention.
I first encountered it — hearing his challenge that we change our government from time to time to avoid the calcification and stasis in the Republic that otherwise would lead to a tyrany of entrenched elites — on the interior of the Jefferson Memorial. His plea stood in stark contrast to what I found engraved on the National Archives building literally and figuratively opposite, across the Mall near the White House, the home of executive power: ”This building….symbolizes our faith in the permanence of our national institutions.”
Jefferson’s statement must be read in context, though. The whole letter is really interesting, and I recommend reading it in full.
What Jefferson was saying in his letter, written after he had retired from public service, was not meant as a guide for judicial interpretation of the Constitution. I am not sure he saw the Consistution as a living document absent amendment. Rather, his letter was more radical: Jefferson was advocating that we engage at least every 20 years or so in a national populist conversation about government, thus to enact regular, periodic amendments to the Constitution by majority rule to keep the ConsItution up to date. That is, completely overhaul the government from time to time based on philosophically consistent democratic and republican principles to prevent entrenched power and corruption. In the letter, he also recommended more direct democracy and devolved local government, equal representation for Congress, direct popular election (or at least executive appointment and legislative confirmation) of the judiciary (including the Supreme Court) and other offices for short limited terms, and sharp curtailment of public debt and taxes. It was a fairly limited view of the federal government, ideally responsive only to shifting majoritian sentiment and local, popular concerns.
Broader civil rights under federal law may well not have emerged from such a system. Many of the populist and anti-tax, anti-public debt views from that letter might be antithetical to the kind of progressive government, protective of minority rights and reliant on a powerful, well-funded federal government, that modern liberals favor. As everything in law and governance, Jefferson’s views are complicated.
Thanks for sharing this quote and the basic point: even Jefferson recognized that our Constitution and system of governance needs to keep pace with the times and not be trapped in a straitjacket of outmoded thinking from prior generations.
Happy Fourth of July.
Allan
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