It's Time to Shift further away from Liberalism
The conservatism that comes with aging is sounding better all the time
This will come as a surprise to those who know me but I’m finding liberalism to be bereft of useful solutions in this modern world. The Supreme Court has been of particular inspiration about the benefits available if we just embrace originalism, which is the love of a group of white guys who hated tea taxes, the imposition of a state religion on the citizenry and who insisted on the financial and religious freedom to keep women and ‘the coloreds’ out of such complex matters.
After her 14th child was born, Anne Hutchinson and her husband - a highly successful textile merchant - left England for the new colonies in America, following their favored Puritan minister, John Cotton, who spoke of the grace bestowed on religious converts, as opposed to the ‘works’ advocated by the King’s Anglican ministers. Cotton fled to America after being threatened to be locked up. But his ‘grace’ was akin to the current Protestant faith that one is saved upon baptism in the name of Jesus.
In Massachusetts, per Wikipedia:
Anne Hutchinson likewise fit into her new home with ease, devoting many hours to those who were ill or in need.[31] She became an active midwife, and while tending to women in childbirth, she provided them with spiritual advice.[32] Magistrate John Winthrop noted that "her ordinary talke was about the things of the Kingdome of God," and "her usuall conversation was in the way of righteousness and kindnesse."[32]
Later in that article:
Hutchinson's visits to women in childbirth led to discussions along the lines of the conventicles in England. She soon began hosting weekly meetings at her home for women who wanted to discuss Cotton's sermons and hear her explanations and elaborations.[31] Her meetings for women became so popular that she had to organise meetings for men, as well, and she was hosting 60 or more people per week.[17] These gatherings brought women, as well as their husbands, "to enquire more seriously after the Lord Jesus Christ."[37]
As the meetings continued, Hutchinson began offering her own religious views, stressing that only "an intuition of the Spirit" would lead to one's election by God, and not good works.[31] Her theological interpretations began diverging from the more legalistic views found among the colony's ministers, and the attendance increased at her meetings and soon included Governor Vane.[31] Her ideas that one's outward behaviour was not necessarily tied to the state of one's soul became attractive to those who might have been more attached to their professions than to their religious state, such as merchants and craftsmen.[31] The colony's ministers became more aware of Hutchinson's meetings, and they contended that such "unauthorised" religious gatherings might confuse the faithful. Hutchinson responded to this with a verse from Titus, saying that "the elder women should instruct the younger."[38]
Eventually, magistrate John Winthrop would become governor and the orthodox church put several people on trial. They had Anne confined to another person’s home during a hard winter, isolated away from her many kids. The conservative church knew better than to let such a sinful woman preach. She also was pregnant. In March 1638, in poor health, she was put on trial.
Her sentence:
Forasmuch as you, Mrs. Hutchinson, have highly transgressed and offended… and troubled the Church with your Errors and have drawen away many a poor soule, and have upheld your Revelations; and forasmuch as you have made a Lye…. Therefor in the name of our Lord Je[sus] Ch[rist]… I doe cast you out and… deliver you up to Sathan… and account you from this time forth to be a Hethen and a Publican…. I command you in the name of Ch[rist] Je[sus] and of this Church as a Leper to withdraw your selfe out of the Congregation.[96]
Hutchinson was now banished from the colony and removed from the congregation, and her leading supporters had been given three months to leave the colony, including Coddington and Coggeshall, while others were disenfranchised or dismissed from their churches.[76] The court in November had ordered that 58 citizens of Boston and 17 from adjacent towns be disarmed unless they repudiated the "seditious label" given them, and many of these people followed Hutchinson into exile.[97]
And boy howdy, those conservatives were right about Hutchinson, as God followed with His own verdict two months after her trial.
Hutchinson went into labour in May 1638, following the stress of her trial, her imprisonment all winter, and the difficult trip to Aquidneck Island. She delivered what her doctor John Clarke[101] described as a handful of transparent grapes. This is known now as a hydatidiform mole, a condition occurring most often in women over 45, resulting from one or two sperm cells fertilising a blighted egg.[102] Hutchinson had been ill most of the winter, with unusual weakness, throbbing headaches, and bouts of vomiting.[102]
The conservatives were vindicated!
The Puritan leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony gloated over Hutchinson's suffering and also that of Mary Dyer, a follower who suffered the premature and stillbirth of a severely deformed infant. The leaders classified the women's misfortunes as the judgement of God.[98] Winthrop wrote, "She brought forth not one, but thirty monstrous births or thereabouts", then continued, "see how the wisdom of God fitted this judgment to her sin every way, for look—as she had vented misshapen opinions, so she must bring forth deformed monsters."[104] Massachusetts continued to persecute Hutchinson's followers who stayed in the Boston area. Laymen were sent from the Boston church to Portsmouth to convince Hutchinson of her errors; she shouted at them, "the Church at Boston? I know no such church, neither will I own it. Call it the whore and strumpet of Boston, but no Church of Christ!"[97]
See? Liberals are stubborn but they always lose.
That’s just one example of why conservatism and originalism have grown more appealling.
Also, as Clarence Thomas noted, conservatives would never protest at the home of a Supreme Justice and undermine the august body that he sits on after he compared his confirmation hearing to a lynching because senators asked him questions about the underling he was hitting on. Again, conservatives are allowed to hit on anyone, while liberal sex undermines the moral fabric of our theocracy. Sounds like a pretty good deal. Respectable, that old fashioned conservatism.
And that originalism stuff sounds just as refreshing. Per Matthew Rozsa at Salon:
…the framers of the Constitution basically said nothing about the Supreme Court's mission, describing it simply as "one supreme Court." The Judiciary Act of 1789, passed during the first year of George Washington's presidency, fleshed out what the court would do, including assigning it six members (a chief justice and five associate justices; that number was officially expanded to nine in 1869). For more than a decade, however, the court took on few cases and had very little to do. The executive branch had proved strong under Washington and Congress quickly took on various legislative roles, but the judicial branch was initially unclear about exactly how much power it really had.
So The Originals, in their infinite wisdom, created a six-justice court with no duties assigned and it took a Civil War 80 years later to expand it to nine. Let’s go back to six, as The Originals intended. They surely had good reason to keep it to six and the Federalist Society would be totally on board with it because originalism is next to godliness. Just drop the three women off the bench and perfecto! The Originals clearly didn’t want women there, or voting or owning property.
Other than the Amendments, every ruling by every justice can then be overturned. The Death penalty began more than a century before the Constitution was written, so we definitely should reinstate that at the federal level. That’s quite a change for me, a former advocate of Gandhi.
Want to stop a serial killer? Conservative capital punishment. It should be delivered in the worst form possible, just for writing nearly a hundred page manifesto before going after these innocents, defined by the Washington Post:
There was Ruth Whitfield, the 86-year-old mother of the city’s retired fire commissioner, whose life’s mission was caring for her aging husband in a nearby nursing home. There was Pearl Young, 77, who fed the hungry and was a “faithful member” of the Church of God in Christ, her pastor said in a tweet. And there was Katherine “Kat” Massey, 72, a civil rights and education activist.
More on Kat:
Choking with tears, sister Barbara Massey described Kat as the oldest of five, “the glue” of a very close family, a well-known community figure who dressed up in costume at the local public school, procured trees and safety rails along neighborhood streets, and assisted in local elections.
“She was the most wonderful person in the world; she’d cut grass in the local park, do the trees, give kids on the street toys. That was my sister, anyone she could help,” said Barbara Massey. Barbara broke down as she described her sister renting a costume for an educational school event to become “Ms. Broccoli” — “for children to learn to eat right.”
That’s right, the strapping young teenager donned full tactical gear to murder an 86 year old, a 77 year old, a 72 year old, a 65 year old, a 62 year old, a 52 year old and the youngest, this 32 year old woman:
Roberta Drury, 32, was also a helper. The youngest of four siblings, she moved from Syracuse to Buffalo in 2010 to assist her oldest brother and help care for his children as he underwent treatment for leukemia.
“She dropped everything to move out there and play house aunt,” said their sister, Amanda Drury, 34. “She was really proud of being able to step in for the family.”
Roberta stayed on as her brother’s home aide and business partner; together they had been rehabilitating a historical bar he had bought, the Dalmatia. As an African American child adopted at 18 months into a suburban White family, Roberta was no stranger to racism, her sister said. But in their family, she said, “Race never mattered. So this is just ugly on a level that as a family we can barely wrap our heads around.”
That’s right, 7 of the 10 people he murdered were women, 6 of them seniors 62 and older. That takes some serious cowardice. The three guys he murdered were 67, the 55 year old security guard (who went down fighting and likely saved more lives in the process), and a 53 year old. So 7 seniors, 2 guys in their 50s and a 32 year old woman. And he wrote about 100 pages to make an excuse for his choice to be a mass murderer?
If I converted to conservatism, this would be such an easy call. Do nothing about the availability of major weaponry provided to a guy hospitalized and assessed a year ago for a threat to shoot up his high school. Washington, Jefferson, Madison and the rest surely wanted him to own as many guns as he could afford. So after conviction, I could propose to toss this guy - live - into a wood chipper.
One or two sentences like that would be a great deterrent to any future guy with murder in his heart from going after seniors or high school students or pre-schoolers or country music fans.
No more of that wussy liberal stuff that never gets done because conservatives won’t let them.
What? Cruel and unusual punishment? That’s some British 1689 shit. This is America! Sure, the 8th Amendment in 1791 outlawed cruel and unusual but it was 1972 before it was better defined. Justice Brennan said the 8th Amendment:
"set the standard that a punishment would be cruel and unusual [if] it was too severe for the crime, [if] it was arbitrary, if it offended society's sense of justice, or if it was not more effective than a less severe penalty."
I’m sure if we asked Congressional conservatives if it was too severe for the crime, none could defend him. There’s nothing arbitrary if we make the wood chipper mandatory for anyone who murders 4 or more people, I don’t think the majority of the country would feel their sense of justice was offended, and it absolutely would prove more effective than any lesser punishmernt.
Any conservative who hesitates on these tests would then have to read that huge 100 page manifesto which would ruin their other plans for the summer and by September, all would be on board with the wood chipper solution.*
(* as I’m still a liberal, though, I can’t advocate for this as a ‘solution’. I’m just stating that it sounds exactly like a ‘solution’ conservatives would rally behind.)
And it doesn’t matter which media talking head, politician or Supreme Spouse promotes the ideas and fears that trigger murderous people to act out their impulses because freedom of speech grants them the right to do that. As a liberal, I’m told the limit is I can’t shout FIRE! in a crowded theater but conservatives can and they can sell you popcorn as you rush out because free market capitalism.
All liberalism has given me is a lot of campaign fund requests from centrists.
There’s one more thing I love about this originalism stuff, though. This is not anything The Originals intended or defined at all, so it’s time to reverse the special privileges these fake people get. Established precedent or settled law no longer applies if the Supreme ones can reverse a 49 year decision like Roe v Wade.
The Originals rightly knew that women and the coloreds were fake people so there’s no way to let these fake people inc have rights and privileges too. Otherwise, everyone would say ‘conservatives are all racist women haters’ and they’d be right.
So don’t let me down, conservatives. Once you reverse corporate personhood you’ll gain me as a happy convert. And I can five you a hell of a deal on a wood chipper too.
Here’s Helen Darling with backing vocals by Garth Brooks