Fighting Words A Toolkit for Combating the Religious Right

by Morgan, Robin

• ISBN13: 9781560259480
• ISBN10: 1560259485
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-08-25
• Publisher: Bold Type Books

Summary

The religious right is gaining enormous power in the United States, thanks to a well-organized, media-savvy movement with powerful friends in high places. Yet many Americans both observant and secular are alarmed by this trend, especially by the religious right's attempts to erase the boundary between church and state and re-make the U.S. into a Christian nation. But most Americans lack the tools for arguing with the religious right, especially when fundamentalist conservatives claim their tradition started with the Framers of The Constitution. Fighting Words is a a tool-kit for arguing, especially for those of us who haven't read the founding documents of this nation since grade school. Robin Morgan has assembled a lively, accessible, eye-opening primer and reference tool, a "verbal karate" guide, revealing what the Framers and many other leading Americans really believed in their own words rescuing the Founders from images of dusty, pompous old men in powdered wigs, and resurrecting them as the revolutionaries they truly were: a hodgepodge of freethinkers, Deists, agnostics, Christians, atheists, and Freemasons and they were radicals as well.

Author Biography

Robin Morgan is an award-winning poet, novelist, political theorist, feminist activist, journalist, editor, and best-selling author. She has published 20 books, including the now-classic anthologies Sisterhood Is Powerful (Random House, 1970) and Sisterhood Is Global (Doubleday, l984; updated edition, The Feminist Press, 1996); with the recent Sisterhood Is Forever: The Women’s Anthology for A New Millennium (Washington Square Press, 2003). A founder/leader of contemporary US feminism, she has also been a leader in the international women’s movement for 25 years. In 1990, as Ms. Editor-in-Chief, she relaunched the magazine as an international, award-winning, ad-free bimonthly, resigning in late 1993 to become Consulting Global Editor. A recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Prize (Poetry), and numerous other honors, she lives in New York City, (www.robinmorgan.us)

Table of Contents

Introduction: It Is Happening Here	ix
Robin Morgan
The Founders' Own Fighting Words	1	(22)
Thomas Paine
Ethan Allen
Benjamin Franklin
George Washington
John Adams
Thomas Jefferson
James Madison
The Genuine Articles: Uncensored	23	(8)
The Declaration of Independence
The Constitution of the United States of America
The Bill of Rights and other Amendments
The Presidential Oath of Office
The Pledge of Allegiance
Coin of the Realm
(More) U.S. Presidents' Fighting Words	31	(12)
John Quincy Adams
Andrew Jackson
Zachary Taylor
Millard Fillmore
Abraham Lincoln
Ulysses S. Grant
James A. Garfield
Theodore Roosevelt
William Howard Taft
Woodrow Wilson
Calvin Coolidge
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Harry S. Truman
John F. Kennedy
Lyndon B. Johnson
Gerald R. Ford
Jimmy Carter
George Herbert Walker Bush
William Jefferson Clinton
The Law	43	(14)
The Myth That U.S. Law Is Based on the Ten Commandments
The Treaty of Tripoli
The Three Tests
Supreme Court Justices' Fighting Words
Notable Americans' Fighting Words on Church v. State, and on Religion v. Spirituality	57	(18)
From Susan B. Anthony to Toni Morrison, Albert Einstein to Charlie Chaplin, Eleanor Roosevelt to Geraldine Ferraro, Barry Goldwater to Barack Obama, Edgar Allen Poe to Martin Luther King Jr., Mark Twain to Carl Sagan, Sojourner Truth to Bill Moyers, and more . . .
Abortion: The Fighting Word?	75	(6)
What the Bible, the Constitution, and the Vatican Really Say (and Don't Say)
In Other Words: The Opposition	81	(22)
Samplings from the Religious Right
After Words (Resources for Action)	103
Groups, Web sites, Books, Articles
The Declaration of Independence
The Constitution of the United States of America
The Bill of Rights and later Amendments to the Constitution