Dick Whitman
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- May 1, 2009
- Messages
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Ryan Lizza has a tremendous profile of Michele Bachmann in this week's New Yorker, detailing her religious influences through the years, as well as some of the contradictions in her biography. (A lot of this feels strangely like Hillary Clinton to me - I'm recalling the Saul Alinsky stuff as well as the dodging-bullets-in-Bosnia tall tale.)
Included on the aforementioned "must read" list from her Web site was a 1997 biography of Robert E. Lee by J. Steven Wilkins, a historian who is part of a movement to frame the Civil War as a theological war between the secular North and Christian South, a place where slave owners kept their slaves out of - get this - benevolence, because the savages were not ready to be released into the world until they were converted.
To wit:
Slavery, as it operated in the pervasively Christian society which was the old South, was not an adversarial relationship founded upon racial animosity. In fact, it bred on the whole, not contempt, but, over time, mutual respect. This produced a mutual esteem of the sort that always results when men give themselves to a common cause. The credit for this startling reality must go to the Christian faith. ... The unity and companionship that existed between the races in the South prior to the war was the fruit of a common faith.
Story also notes that Bachmann's campaign team is very uncomfortable whenever she starts spouting off about how the Founding Fathers battled hard to abolish slavery, even the ones who owned slaves. According to the theory underpinning her belief is that those Founding Fathers kept their slaves out of - wait for it - belevolence.
From a book by her law school mentor, which she assisted with: "Many Christians opposed slavery even though they owned slaves. ... 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."
I'm wondering if Bachmann will eventually have a serious Jeremiah Wright problem on her hands.
Included on the aforementioned "must read" list from her Web site was a 1997 biography of Robert E. Lee by J. Steven Wilkins, a historian who is part of a movement to frame the Civil War as a theological war between the secular North and Christian South, a place where slave owners kept their slaves out of - get this - benevolence, because the savages were not ready to be released into the world until they were converted.
To wit:
Slavery, as it operated in the pervasively Christian society which was the old South, was not an adversarial relationship founded upon racial animosity. In fact, it bred on the whole, not contempt, but, over time, mutual respect. This produced a mutual esteem of the sort that always results when men give themselves to a common cause. The credit for this startling reality must go to the Christian faith. ... The unity and companionship that existed between the races in the South prior to the war was the fruit of a common faith.
Story also notes that Bachmann's campaign team is very uncomfortable whenever she starts spouting off about how the Founding Fathers battled hard to abolish slavery, even the ones who owned slaves. According to the theory underpinning her belief is that those Founding Fathers kept their slaves out of - wait for it - belevolence.
From a book by her law school mentor, which she assisted with: "Many Christians opposed slavery even though they owned slaves. ... 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."
I'm wondering if Bachmann will eventually have a serious Jeremiah Wright problem on her hands.
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