You asked me why a Constitutional convention had to be avoided at all cost. It's because people like this will attend:
interactive.wsj.com
June 23, 1999
Jefferson in New Jersey
When Rosie O'Donnell asked the star of "Annie Get Your Gun" to edit out a reference to shooting in one of the lead songs, the papers and late-night T.V. rightly hooted. But what are we to make of a similar effort in the New Jersey Assembly to censor Thomas Jefferson?
Earlier this month New Jersey's lower house passed a bill that would require two sentences from the Declaration of Independence to be "orally recited" in the public schools every day along with the pledge of allegiance. But a senate committee has now tabled the measure after it came under attack from a group of New Jersey legislators and activists. Their objection? They say the selection would encourage racism, sexism and, um, God.
Introduced last year by Republican state Senator Gerald Cardinale, the bill was picked up in the other chamber by Michael Carroll, a GOP assemblyman from Morris County. The offensive 56 words Messrs. Cardinale and Carroll intend to inflict on the New Jersey schools are as follows: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness -- That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
Mr. Carroll contends that in these two sentences are distilled the essence of the American proposition, and it's hard to argue with him. Or so most folks might think. But not Assemblywoman Nia Gill (D-Essex), who introduced an amendment that would substitute the word "all people" where Jefferson had written "men" and would add the 13th and 19th Amendments to the Constitution to be recited, too. Without these changes, she fears, schoolchildren who take Jefferson straight will be imbibing the Colonial values of exclusion. "We understood that the men who wrote them, some were slave owners, and some were fathers of slave children," the Associated Press quoted her as saying.
Likewise Neil Cohen (D-Union), who finds the Declaration's reference to the "Creator" distressing. According to the Newark Star Ledger, Mr. Cohen attacked the amendment as a "thinly veiled" attempt "dressed up in patriotic garb and colors" to introduce prayer into the public schools.
Or Elizabeth Volz, president of the New Jersey chapter of the National Organization for Women, who found the whole thing "dangerous." "You don't want [the message] tainted, that's only for boys, only for men," she told the Record.
Clearly it is possible to read America's founding document this way. But only if you have been taught to do so. Evidently it has not occurred to Ms. Gill that Lincoln's whole case against slavery rested on the violence it did to the very lines Assemblyman Carroll and Senator Cardinale want to see recited in the schools. Ditto for sexism and religion. It is hard to see how the Declaration sneaks "God" into a school system that already acknowledges His existence in our Pledge of Allegiance. As for Ms. Gill, we wonder whether even Martin Luther King's letter from Birmingham Jail would pass muster today, given its reference to a civil rights movement intended to "help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood" (emphasis added).
As Orwell warned more than six decades ago, attacks on substance tend to manifest themselves first in a corruption of the language. Say what you will about Jefferson the man, the words and intentions of these two passages are manifestly clear. Maybe that's just what has his New Jersey critics so riled.
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