Sweet FSM, save us.

why repost?

@2: It's a different column than the one that ran yesterday.

And here I thought that this sort of 100 year old Save Yo' Confederate Money Son The South Will Rise Again-ism was only to be found down here in Dixie.

Of course, the column WAS written forty years ago, but still...

Holy shit.

Way to completely ignore the fact the the Southern States seceded from the Union, shot at federal troops, and then drafted laws to reduce blacks to a condition that was slavery in all but name even before the ink was dry on the 13th Amendment. The way I see it, irregular times call for irregular measures, and the South forfeited its right to dictate the terms of its reintegration when it started shooting at Fort Sumter. The 14th Amendment was necessary to ensure the rights of millions of oppressed people and represented one of the greatest instances of moral progress out nation has ever known. For the oppressor to cry foul and call himself a victim when the tables are turned, to say that something is being forced on him when the reality is that he is being prevented from forcing something on others, is wrong and should not be viewed as legitimate. The federal government was well within its rights to decide the terms of Southern reintegration without the input of the South. All told, the South got off much easier than they would have done in any other country, given the nature of the provocation.

It's really both an affirming statement about our democracy and a sad commentary that there are people like him. Even the hypocrite gets a voice and power.

If it's true that the 14th Amendment is invalid, then why didn't he go on to explain that the Bill of Rights applies only to the federal government, and not the states? So the states would be free to pass laws establishing an official church, criminalizing certain speech, even banning handguns!

States had established state churches up until the 1820s, and Southern states, beginning in the 1830s, could ban abolitionist literature. In the 1833 case Barron v. Baltimore, the Supreme Court specifically ruled that the Bill of Rights provided "security against the apprehended encroachments of the general government—not against those of local governments."

@9: It's a figure of speech; it doesn't mean he's actually supposed to be supremely evil.

I wouldn't put too much criticism on a column he wrote in college paper 40+ years ago. And the name "The Devil's Advocate" suggests that he might have been making unpopular legal arguments simply as an intellectual exercise. Kind of like a debate class, when you are assigned to argue a topic you don't necessarily agree with. Or writing contrarian radical nonsense on a blog of an anti-establishment newspaper.

There's a fairly high likelihood that he didn't even fully believe this crap even when he wrote it, much less today, 40 years later.

Criticize him for his current beliefs and recent rulings as a judge, but it is silly to mock him for things he wrote in college 40 years ago.

@ 11
"he might have been making unpopular legal arguments simply as an intellectual exercise."

That might be true if those words were written today but considering the political and social climate of the time, I tend to believe that those words were his and many others' beliefs. Those opinions in the column were hardly unpopular back then.

These columns actually cheer me up. I see them, and how ridiculous they seem now, and then I think about the anti-marriage equality and anti-choice columns that run in the Daily nowadays, and I think about ridiculous they will seem in 40 years.

@13: Except if you actually read Eli's article instead of just bloviating, and actually read some of Sanders's opinions in the intervening years, you'd know that he actually does believe this kind of shit, and hasn't disavowed these columns. And Eli even left out how Sanders served as Jeanette Burrage's lawyer for years.

@15 : What the fuck? Apparently you don't know how to read. The point I was making was that those columns were not satire and were reflecting his beliefs. So please take your hostility towards me and shove it up your ass.

OK, now I'm a fan of the 14th amendment and don't propose it's revocation but can anyone confirm or deny the points he's making about how it was passed? If he's right about that then it really is pretty shady.

That said, his comment that it was "conceived under the most undemocratic conditions imaginable" shows that he does not have a very good imagination, or for that matter a very good grasp on historical, or current, undemocratic conditions.

I think we can agree that the 14th amendment is an unmitigated good. That said, it was put through in a pretty sketchy manner.

There are a lot of lessons to take away from this. "Sometimes one must do a good thing in a distasteful manner," would be one. Perhaps one could also suggest that this is perfect evidence for why racist assholes shouldn't even be allowed to govern themselves.

The one lesson NOT to take away from this is, "We should do away with the 14th amendment, given the circumstances of its ratification."