Not All of the Founding Fathers Were Patriots

I finally took the time to watch the HBO documentary, "John Adams," and found it engaging even as it opened my eyes to the fact that I much more a Jeffersonian than most of my everyday, religious-right, conservative acquaintances. To my disappointment, I heard former president John Adams sounding like a typical, modern-day liberal. It is no wonder that his eldest son, the over-achiever/responsible child of Adam's clearly dysfunctional family, who later became sixth president of the United States, immediately assumed the roll of a socialist leader. It was only Thomas Jefferson who I found consistently reasonable. In vain, Jefferson continuously beat the drum of libertarianism to Adams during his presidency. For some reason, many people, the religious right, neo-conservatives especially, tend to delude themselves by idealizing our founding fathers as being the apostles of the "free world." Deeper investigation shows that this was far from the case.

As Polycentricorder.com puts it, "In the first place its important to recognize that not all of the “founding fathers” were patriots. There was quite a large contingency of men during those formative years that were not in favor of liberty for mankind, nor for low taxation, nor for a limited government. Ben Franklin at one point put fourth the idea of doing away with the states entirely and having a single central government to rule the entire country. Hamilton envisioned an American empire based off the British Empire. And George Washington after Fighting a war over taxes on tea, was ready to fight a war against his own people who were rebelling over his unjust tax on whiskey. On the other side there were principled men, who were of the opinion that what London was doing wasn’t right, and it wouldn’t be right even if it were our government that did it. George Mason, and Patrick Henry, chief among them, campaigned against the Ratification of the Constitution in Virginia, and were instrumental in the drafting of the Bill of Rights, without which, the constitution would be clearly seen for what it is, the Charter of a centralized, overbearing, intrusive and unjust centralized government."

"The Constitution is not holy, it was not written by the finger of God on stone tablets and brought down from Mount Sini by Washington! the men who voted for it, were not founding fathers, but traitors to the revolution. Its justification, the very excuse for a stronger centralized government was to beat the british and gain our independence, they said the Articles were not strong enough. And if we lived in Ray Bradbury’s novel, we might accept this as truth, but the fact is that the King signed a peace treaty with the 13 colonies and Vermont four years before the constitution was ratified. Turns out the constitution was entirely unnecessary. Yet there was a silver lining, in that dark our. The Anti Federalist, those against a strong centralized government gave us the bill of rights, the first 10 amendments to the constitution."

Read more here: Polycentricorder