Sorry that my candor in stating historical facts upsets your delicate sensibilities, but the attempt to browbeat me into refuting something I never said is both ludicrous and puerile.
Please show me one post where I did so much as intimate that slavery is a morally acceptable institution.
I'll be more than happy to discuss historical facts and constitutional law, but if you're just going to EMOTE, please do it somewhere else.
Thank you.
If you can't understand the implications of your own beliefs, I don't know if I can make it simple enough for you, but start right here:
Your post 108:
The legal right to own slaves in this country was a fact before the Constitution was even conceived, so the federal government had no say-so on the issue of slavery in the states where it existed.
After the election of Lincoln, the South's choice was to leave the Union, or stay and let the federal government collapse their agriculturally driven economies.
Some choice.
It is clear that you are saying that the federal government had no right to eliminate slavery. Even if the states passed a Constitutional amendment that eliminated slavery, your position is that southern states had no obligation to accept that result.
Not only that, but your comment shows without a doubt that you believe that slavery was necessary to the Southern states, such that the North's effort to eliminate it over decades would "collapse their agriculturally driven economies". Based on that necessity, you say that the South had no choice but to fight. The mere chance that someday in the future the Federal government would restrict in some way the institution of slavery forced the south into the civil war.
Being forced to fight implies that they had a just cause, in your addled mind. Their cause was the maintenance of the institution of slavery. Ergo, you believe in the year 2009 that the South in 1861 should have been allowed to continue its practice of slavery, and not just that, but that it should have been guaranteed somehow that its institution could never be interfered with by the Feds or the other states. Thus, you support the continuation of the institution of slavery by the south after 1861, and continuing indefinitely into the future, until those states decided to change their own laws on slaves. In your view, no one could change those laws but the individual state.
This further leads to the conclusion that you accept that it would be entirely appropriate and perhaps even desirable that slavery continue into the decades and centuries after 1861, for as long as the free white people of Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Texas or whatever slave state you name, wanted it to. Knowing people from those states and growing up a long time ago, and being from a family of confederate soldiers, I can tell you that left to their own devices, the people from those states would have been happy to maintain slavery to the present day. I can tell you sure wouldn't mind. The natural implication and result of your contentions here, therefore, is that slavery today, in 2009, would be fine and dandy. By now, we'd have whole oil installations and manufacturing plants staffed with Negro slaves, and it would destroy the southern economy to change that. Can't have that, can we?
The end result of your beliefs is the justification and perpetuation of evil. That you believe these things and walk among us is scary, but that you don't realize the implications of your beliefs is scarier. Such failures of intellect are how small immoralities, self-delusions, turn into larger ones, leading to acceptance of fascism, communism or slave states. In this age when we are going to have to begin fighting to prevent imposition of a new form of slavery, we need to recognize the evil of an old one.
I will say a prayer for your soul tonight, and thank the Lord that your view was defeated 144 years ago.