Talk:Bios:Founding Fathers

From dKosopedia

I have problems with this page. The source of its information <http://www.constitutionfacts.com/constitution/Const_facts.htm> has no identification. Searching Google for their publisher turns up a lot of homeschooling sites, but no identification of who they are or what their agenda is. The author of the dKos page claims to have used them "mostly because it came up first in a meta-search of multiple search engines" but we all know about Google bombing. I want to know who is behind this site, what they really know about the Constitution and what their agenda is. Their site tells me nothing, not even their name.

More seriously bringing what they know into question, the site this is based on <http://www.constitutionfacts.com/constitution/Const_facts.htm> starts out with some obvious and serious errors, such as that "The Constitution does not set forth requirements for the right to vote. As a result, at the outset of the Union, only male property-owners could vote. African Americans were not considered citizens, and women were excluded from the electoral process. Native Americans were not given the right to vote until 1924."

The Constitution left most voter qualifications to states, in fact a lot of voter qualifications are still states' rights. States can let foreign residents vote if they want to, they can lower the voting age below 18 if they want to, the right of felons to vote varies by state (which has become a civil rights issue) etc. etc. etc. And that's after several amendments to make voting more uniform across the several states.

AAMOF, at the time the Constitution was ratified, five states (including North Carolina) allowed free blacks to vote, a fact which Abraham Lincoln made a big deal about in his Cooper Union speech. Property qualifications varied from state to state and continued to do so as they had nothing to do with the federal government. Women could vote in New Jersey and a few of them did. The expression "excluding Indians not taxed" in the Constitution also implies that at least some states considered Indians potential voting citizens. And in fact the claim that "The Constitution does not set forth requirements for the right to vote." is flat out false. The Constitution says that voters for Congress must have the "Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature." That's why there was a woman in Congress, Jeanette Rankin of Montana, before women got the vote nationally. Montana (and several other western states) let women vote and voted women into office before the federal constitution was amended to make the other states give women their rights, too.

In short these people may have looked up a lot of interesting facts about the authors of the Constitution, but they don't really know much about the document and they certainly aren't specialists in constitutional law. If you really want to know more facts about the Constitution, may I suggest going to the National Constitution Center <http://www.constitutioncenter.org/> instead?