Written One Year Ago, My Comments On "Originalism" In Response To Our Professor

 Written one year ago July 11, 2021 --  (title added, with editing for clarity and grammar)

Dark Territory--- "Originalism" And Its Corollary "Textualism" Are Religious Fundamentalism Disguised As Law

One of my friends posted an excellent quote from Heather Cox Richardson's letter last night, attacking "originalism", the legal doctrine of the "Federalist Society" which is the "tip of the spear" for the right-wing SCOTUS justice's assault on the Constitution and our democracy. 

So, in response I noted a few of my thoughts on where this outlook comes from. It is a dishonest and hypocritical deception that those who scream loudest about defending their "religious freedom", are themselves using the courts and rigging elections to impose their religious views on the majority of people and the government in order to create a theocracy.  This is, for lack of a better word, "dark territory" for the future of the United States. 

So, I thought I would repost my comment here for discussion. Thanks for reading.

["Originalists "interpret" the intent of the framers of the Constitution in the same way Christian fundamentalists interpret the Bible. They cherry pick and distort certain sections which are consistent with their political/social/cultural agenda. 

For the most part the word "conservative" in politics today is a euphemism for Confederate, and has been formally so in terms of the GOP platform since the '90's ascendancy of Newt Gingrich and his "Contract for America". 

When today's legal conservatives espouse "originalism," it is rooted in their conscious determination to deconstuct or annihilate the preamble of the Constitution. The framers actual "intent" thusly stated was to give future generations of our elected representatives wide latitude for "implied powers," as opposed to only "expressed powers" to provide for the "common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity."

Whether they were slave plantation owners in the antebellum south, or are the fascist billionaire corporate looters of today, these forces have always hated the preamble with every fiber of their being. The idea of the "general welfare" runs up against their social Darwinist, eugenicist, and predestinationist concept of "survival of the fittest". Their version of "posterity" is centered around perpetuating their own family blood lines, inherited wealth, political power, and obtaining reserved seating in their perverse notion of an affluent and segregated heaven, not the blessings of liberty for "all". They are by definition oligarchs in their identity.

It is simply the case that a vast complex of political, legal, religious and corporate insurrectionists (long in the making) are picking cases and passing laws through which they can disembowel those constitutional amendments which manifest and defend "the general welfare principle." They have picked a moment of our history in which they believe they have the leeway to do so. 

These recent and impending court rulings are originalist only in the sense that they hearken back to the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the religious wars of Europe, and the fundamentalist Christian organized slave-owner's Confederacy. They are the original principles of "Jim Crow," and the original economic thinking behind the Wall Street robber barons who caused our "Great Depression."  This is all being done in the name of America's framers, who despite many revisionist's reactionary characterizations, were not all Christian misogynistic slave-owners, never all "one thing." The framers were not "the snow-covered pasture in which all cows were white," there was differentiation among them.  The system of law which this court is out to destroy flows from the preamble to the Constitution which they wrote and adopted. It is the only "statement of intent" in the Constitution itself that exists or matters. 

The three most important writings in which the intent of the framers is stated clearly are the Declaration of Independence, the "Federalist Papers," and the preamble. The originalists in the legal profession are at war with the framers who wrote them, and are comparable in their methods to the sophists of ancient Greece who lied and dissembled for a living on behalf of the would- be Olympian oligarchs of their day. In my view, ultimately, they fear the progress of science, (as the mythical Zeus feared the giver of fire, Prometheus), which empowers the individual and secures our posterity.

Fundamentalist religion, textualism, and originalism in the law are methodologically the same. Think of the "Scopes Monkey Trial". That's a good reference point for the corrupt and irrational outlook underlying these constructs, and we are currently right back there fighting the same battle in every sphere. It is why I believe that any discussion of originalism should start with the Confederacy, and the role of their fundamentalist churches in preaching that slavery was "biblical". It all flows from that "Big Lie".]