Sometimes a small innocuous article on page 17 of section 2 can jump off the page and mess you up. That was the case today when I read a little NYTs story syndicated in The Houston Chronicle.
Seems an ill informed Arkansas state legislator (a Democrat) thought to designate January 29th as Thomas Paine Day. If you know the Thomas Paine story, you also know that anywhere South of Chicago is not the place to even mention this particular Founding Father. After Paine returned from witnessing the French Revolution and writing profusely that religion, politics and morality should be considered by cognitive means, and the use of something called reason, that the public pressure of 18th Century religious dogma caused even our Founding Fathers to literally shun him. He died alone and was buried in a pauper’s grave.
So you can well imagine what happened in Little Rock the other day. The top DUMBASS in the state, Republican state legislator Sid Rosenbaum, rallied the rest of his fellow Republicans to defeat the measure, arguing that in his classic book, Age of Reason, Paine stated a preference for reason over religion. As such, Thomas Pain was anti-Christian as well as anti-Jewish. Reason is indeed anathema to every DUMBASS in America, who lately seem to be once again defining their borders the same as they did in 1861.