Jack Crowe wrote in the National Review that after praising the Founders as “geniuses” for devising the American system of government, Cory Booker implied that an acknowledgement of the racism and misogyny typical of the Founders’ era required a rejection of constitutional originalism.

Cory Booker said:

“I love that my colleagues keep going back to the Constitution but understand this: I laud our Founders, I think they were geniuses. But I understand that millions of Americans understand that they were also flawed people.We know our Founders and their values and their ideals but we also know that they were flawed and you can see that in the documents. Native Americans were referred to as savages, women weren’t referred to at all, African Americans were referred to as fractions of human beings. As one civil-rights activist used to say ‘constitutu, constitu, I can only say three-fifths of the word.”

I couldn’t agree more. We, as human beings are flawed. My grade 10 teacher spoke to us about human frailty. He told us that people are not perfect. Only God is perfect (You were allowed to have these discussions back then) He said that people aspire to that perfection. For me that means aspiring to live this demanding ethic that is rooted in the statements that all life is sacred and that all people are born with equal intrinsic value. The Document to which Booker refers sits on that absolute ethic from the Bible: all people are born with equal intrinsic value. That value is the reason we have women’s rights, civil rights, and gay rights.

The character of the people is irrelevant; that they came up with this document based on that ethic, despite their flaws is a miracle.

The Founders of America wrote:

“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.”

And that statement makes it possible for flawed people to demand equality.

John Adams, a member of the Declaration of Independence committee and second president of the United States (1797–1801), understood the deep connection between ethical monotheism and freedom.

I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist, and believed in blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations. If I were an atheist of the other sect, who believe or pretend to believe that all is ordered by chance, I should believe that chance had ordered the Jews to preserve and propagate to all mankind the doctrine of a supreme, intelligent, wise, almighty, sovereign of the universe, which I believe to be a great essential principle of all morality, and consequently of all civilization.

That statement made it possible for  Abraham Lincoln to deliver his final Emancipation Proclamation January 1, 1863, in which declared “that all persons held as slaves” within the rebel states “are, and henceforward shall be free.”

Martin Luther King was able to stand up and call for equal rights because of the words of the Declaration: The literal meaning of those words. Not an interpretation.

As Barack Obama, in his “Call to Renewal” keynote address on June 28, 2006, in Washington D.C., said:

Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King—indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history—were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religion to argue for their cause. So to say that men and women should not inject their “personal morality” into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Yet, Cory Booker, having attacked the flaws of the Founders, has aligned himself with Stokely Carmichael, the activist to whom he refers in his previous quote in the article.

“Native Americans were referred to as savages, women weren’t referred to at all, African Americans were referred to as fractions of human beings. As one civil-rights activist used to say ‘constitutu, constitu, I can only say three-fifths of the word.”

Booker also said:

Stokely Carmichael said it best: we are the leaders we’ve been looking for. You have a choice to make every single moment of your life: to accept conditions as they are or take responsibility for changing them. And we are the ones that must lead in this movement. I’m kind of tired of people yearning for some hero to come in and save us. The reality is, we are the saviors.”

I would suggest that Carmichael might be a tad flawed.

Here are some of his views.

“The only good Zionist is a dead Zionist we must take a lesson from Hitler” and “The only position for women in SNCC is prone.”

 

Black Panther Mark Essex burst into a New Orleans hotel, shouting, “I want the whites!” He murdered a young honeymooning couple, hotel guests and staff members, and a number of police officers. Stokely Carmichael praised Essex, saying, “We should study and learn from the actions of Brother Essex. We should understand that Brother Essex carried our struggle to its next quantitative level, the level of science.”

“Zionist pigs have been harassing us everywhere,” he warned at the University of Maryland, “And when this anger rises, will snap our fingers and finish them off.”

Carmichael had also declared:

“I’ve never admired a white man, but the greatest of them, to my mind, was Hitler.”

“Go home and get your guns,” Carmichael had urged after Martin Luther King’s death, “When the white man comes he is coming to kill you. I don’t want any black blood in the street.”

 

Will that be constitutional originalism or interpretation?

 

From the Ethics of the Fathers: “Rabbi Tarfon used to say, it is not incumbent upon you to complete the task, but you are not exempt from undertaking it.”