John Adams Tag

14 May

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized

This week I want to focus on a small story that got insufficient coverage in the Trump glut of news, since it merely is about two of the most important founding principals of our Republic: freedom of speech and freedom of religion. You may have heard that on April 16, Speaker of the House of Representatives Paul Ryan announced that Fr. Patrick Conroy, a Jesuit priest and the House chaplain since 2011, would be stepping down. A day later, it turned out that Conroy was not leaving voluntarily but that the Speaker's chief of staff had told him to resign or be fired. Conroy duly tendered his letter of resignation, to take effect on May 24. But then in strode Nancy Pelosi, House Minority Leader and former Speaker herself, to Conroy's defense. Pelosi takes her Catholicism as seriously as her politics—yet she once endured a six-year estrangement from her mother, with...

05 Mar

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized

Last week, I referred to the genesis of the Second Amendment, and its original intent. The volume of listener response, stunned at hearing facts I mentioned in passing, made me realize it was time to revisit this subject in greater depth. I'd done just that a few years ago, but there are lots of new readers on this blog post, and besides, in this "information age," facts can get buried under so-called information. Some scholars still disagree with aspects of this finding, but it's pretty well-documented history, thanks to the work of Roger Williams School of Law professor Carl T. Bogus in 1998, as well as that of historian Richard Hildreth as early as 1840 (on the antebellum South), and in 1995 of Clayton Cramer, on the Second Amendment basis for the Black Codes adopted after the Civil War, requiring emancipated Africans and African Americans (but not whites) to obtain...