1-22-16
This Mormon pseudo-historian is why the Oregon militants are so confused about the Constitution
Historians in the Newstags: Constitution, Mormon, LDS, Oregon militia
Any time the Oregon militants record a video testimonial — and they do that a lot — they’re conspicuously displaying a pocket Constitution.
That’s inspired some obvious jokes about whether they should pull out those Constitutions out of their pockets once in awhile and read them — but that actually misses the point.
The militants do read those pocket Constitutions, but they’re also reading fraudulent interpretations scribbled in the margins, so to speak, by a communist-hating conspiracy theorist promoted by Glenn Beck, reported the Los Angeles Times.
Those annotations were written decades ago by W. Cleon Skousen, an ultra-conservative Mormon and former FBI agent who believed the Founding Fathers had established a Christian theocracy and never intended for the federal government to have any authority.
Constitutional scholars, however, generally hold Skousen’s theories in churlish regard.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning constitutional historian Jack Rakove, of Stanford University, said Skousen’s writings were “a joke that no self-respecting scholar would think is worth a warm pitcher of spit.” ...
comments powered by Disqus
News
- Josh Hawley Earns F in Early American History
- Does Germany's Holocaust Education Give Cover to Nativism?
- "Car Brain" Has Long Normalized Carnage on the Roads
- Hawley's Use of Fake Patrick Henry Quote a Revealing Error
- Health Researchers Show Segregation 100 Years Ago Harmed Black Health, and Effects Continue Today
- Nelson Lichtenstein on a Half Century of Labor History
- Can America Handle a 250th Anniversary?
- New Research Shows British Industrialization Drew Ironworking Methods from Colonized and Enslaved Jamaicans
- The American Revolution Remains a Hotly Contested Symbolic Field
- Untangling Fact and Fiction in the Story of a Nazi-Era Brothel