This is how we acknowledge Memorial Day at the Aubrecht house.

The “Join, or Die.” flag is based on a well-known political cartoon that was created by Benjamin Franklin and first published in his Pennsylvania Gazette on May 9, 1754. The image appeared alongside an editorial about the disunited state of the colonies, and helped make his point about the importance of colonial unity. The powerful depiction of a segmented snake resonated with his readers who adopted it as a symbol of colonial freedom during the American Revolutionary War.

Franklin was well aware of the courage and sacrifice that would be required to prevent his visual metaphor from becoming a reality. In a letter written to his friend Jonathan Shipley in 1782 he wrote, “After much occasion to consider the folly and mischiefs of a state of warfare, and the little or no advantage obtained even by those nations who have conducted it with the most success, I have been apt to think that there has never been, nor ever will be, any such thing as a good war, or a bad peace.”

I spoke with my friend Benjamin Smith at Patriots of the American Revolution. Due to a high volume of articles my feature on the Alexander Hamilton – Aaron Burr duel titled “American Gladiators” has been pushed from the July/August issue to the September/October mag. Ben also approved my pitch for a feature on Thomas Paine titled “Beliefs of an Unbeliever.” This piece will look at his highly controversial pamphlet The Age of Reason; Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology.

After a 2-year hiatus, I am returning to the Gathering of Eagles at the Winchester Court House Civil War Museum on Saturday, June 4th. This will be my fourth appearance at this unique re-enactment hosted by Lee’s Lieutenants. I will be set up in the author’s area, selling copies of “The Angel of Marye’s Heights” on DVD, as well as Will White’s soundtrack on CD. Hope to see you there.

There are some BIG announcements coming up from Right Stripe Media. Good things continue to happen with our first documentary The Angel of Marye’s Heights and we are deep into the planning stages for our second film project on Billy The Kid (working title: “El Chivato”) Details to come. My partner Clint Ross and I have been approached by a school teacher from Ditmas Junior High School in New York who is in the process of gathering materials to teach young children about the Civil War. We have agreed to provide a free copy of our DVD along with some personalized letters for the class. This means that “The Angel” is now being shown at the elementary, middle school and college level. On a slightly related topic, I hope to have the video from my speech in Pittsburgh on the 123rd PA Volunteers posted in a week or two.

In keeping with our current events theme… 

This past week witnessed a resurgence of debate over the issue of gay marriage. These discussions have reignited the controversy surrounding the Federal Marriage Amendment (FMA), a proposed addition to the United States Constitution which would limit marriage in the United States to unions of one man and one woman. This proposal also prevents the judicial extension of marriage rights and medical benefits to same-sex couples. After failing to pass the FMA at a national level in 2006, proponents shifted their focus to limiting the rights of homosexuals at the state level.

Five years later the debate rages on and it is impossible not to compare the current plight of the gay community to previous trials of suffrage and segregation. Whereas prejudice once ruled over race and gender, it now presides over sexual preference. History therefore shows us that it is only a matter of time before the civil rights of homosexuals will be recognized as being equal to their heterosexual neighbors. Until then, America will continue its longstanding hypocrisy of preaching freedom for all, while simultaneously depriving it from a portion of its own citizens.

Often times those engaged in these pseudo-moralistic debates attempt to gain the upper hand by calling on the wisdom of the Founding Fathers. This is done in a vain attempt to bolster their side of the argument while bringing confidence to their cause. More often than not, the revealing nature of the Founder’s views prevents either side from claiming their endorsement. Adding to this folly is the vast misconception that the Founders were somehow our contemporaries and would share our same perceptions. The reality is that they lived in a very different world and any attempt to draw a parallel between them (then) and us (now) is completely illogical.

One of the more difficult revelations to accept when examining the Founding Fathers is that they were wrong. As brilliant and admirable as these men were, they were mere mortals, capable of making mistakes, or worse, perpetrating ignorance. Among their character flaws were chauvinism, bigotry and prejudice. These of course were standard principles for the period, but nevertheless they are to be condemned. It is only when we acknowledge the Founder’s primitive views on women and minorities that we can truly see how far we have come. And although the same cannot yet be said for the gay community, they have also traversed a remarkable distance from where we started as a nation. Believe it or not there was a time in American history when homosexuality was recognized as a capital crime, punishable by death.

In 1976 Louis Compton, a faculty member at the University of Nebraska published a study titled “Homosexuals and the Death Penalty in Colonial America.” (Read PDF here) The abstract of this paper states that the article traces the legislative history of statutes prescribing the death penalty for sodomy in 17th-century New England and in the other American colonies. His introduction follows:

As the nation prepares to celebrate the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence, the question of the status of the homosexual in pre-Revolutionary America comes to mind. The Body of Liberties approved by the Colony of Massachusetts Bay in 1641 welcomed refugees seeking to escape “the Tiranny or oppression of their persecutors” or famines or wars. For several hundred years America was to serve as a haven for minorities threatened with religious or political persecution in other lands. What then did it offer the homosexual? Not, assuredly, liberty or the pursuit of happiness. Indeed, it appears that in 1776 male homosexuals in the original 13 colonies were universally subject to the death penalty, and that in earlier times, for a brief period in one colony, lesbians had been liable to the same punishment for relations with other women. The following essay is an attempt to trace the capital laws against homosexuals in these colonies from their origin in the first settlements until their abolition after the Revolution.

The first official statute against homosexuality cited by Compton was passed by British Parliament in 1533 under King Henry VIII. This law made it a capital felony for anyone to “commit the detestable and abominable vice of buggery with mankind…” Although the act was repealed and re-enacted on multiple occasions, it was later reinstated by Queen Elizabeth in 1563 and remained relatively unchanged until 1861. Only then was the mandatory death penalty dropped in favor of life imprisonment. English Continental law, following the biblically influenced canon-law also included lesbian-acts in its list of offenses. As the British Empire spread across the Atlantic Ocean to the American colonies, five of the pre-revolutionary settlements in the south adopted variations of the English law. Northern colonies however developed their own Puritan-influenced version which eventually led the way for America’s unique legal-style.

In 1641, the Bay Colony adopted a new “Body of Laws and Liberties” which included 12 capital crimes to include sodomy. The inclusion of the Old Testament language contained in the Book of Leviticus (20:13) reveals the 2,000+ year of influence that permeated this statute. The verse states: “If any man lyeth with mankinde as he lyeth with a woman, both of them have committed abhomination, they both shall surely be put to death.” Known for their religious superstitions the Puritans felt that their claims in the New World could be taken by God if they failed to uphold their biblical principles and left “sexual criminals” unpunished. These anti-deviate laws remained in one form or another and continued to spread in unison with the colonies expansion. (Surprisingly England and France eventually lifted all references to illegal sodomy in 1791 in the wake of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which had maintained that “liberty consists in the power to do anything that does not injure others” and that “the law has the right to forbid only such actions as are injurious to society.”)

Fast forward to 1779 when Virginia Governor Thomas Jefferson established a committee tasked with reforming VA’s criminal codes. While presenting his manuscript titled “Bill Proportioning Crimes and Punishments” Jefferson explained that a number of existing penalties would be excluded under the Bill of Rights which forbid cruel and unusual punishments. This antiquated concept of proportional punishments mimicked an ‘eye-for-an-eye’ in which poisoners were poisoned, maimers maimed, and sodomites castrated. On June 18, 1779 Jefferson’s committee put forth a bill that stated “whosoever shall be guilty of Rape, Polygamy, or Sodomy, with man or woman, shall be punished, if a man, with castration, if a woman, by cutting thro' the cartilage of her nose a hole of one half inch diameter at the least.” The Virginia legislation never adopted Jefferson’s bill and when a revised code was released in 1792, sodomy was once again identified as a capital offense punishable by death.

Individual states began repealing similar rulings at a state level and in 1873, (12 years after England had dropped it) South Carolina became the last and final state in America to eliminate the death penalty in favor of an up-to 5-year prison sentence for homosexual acts. This proclamation ended two centuries of capital punishment for having same sex relations in the United States. There are two incidents of executions included in Compton’s paper. The first was the case of a gay Virginian named William Cornish who was caught having sexual relations with a man, sentenced, and killed in 1625. (No data exists on his partner.)The second was the hanging of another homosexual named William Plain at Guilford in 1646. Both of these citizens paid dearly for their taboo lifestyles. Fortunately as the nation progressed so did their perceptions of crime and punishment. Still this evolving mindset did nothing for the day-to-day lives of homosexuals who were forced to live in secret. Compton’s own retrospective summarizes the plight of the gay community in colonial times:

America's capital laws must have created a psychological reign of terror for the homosexual in the 17th and 18th centuries. Discrimination could be justified by pointing to the death penalty as a sign of the intensity of society's disapprobation. Presumably, few homosexuals emigrated to America with Puritan settlers. But there is no reason to suppose that America's first colonists had fewer homosexual sons and daughters than any other group. For these young people, “growing up gay” in the land of the free must have been a brutalizing experience.

Recognizing our nation’s penchant for righting wrongs, it’s hard to believe that government-endorsed ‘homophobia’ continues to exist in the 21st-century. Whereas we once looked down upon our fellow citizens for their gender or skin color, we wouldn’t think of condoning the practice of sexism or racism today. Unfortunately we cannot say the same for our homosexual neighbors who continue to demand representation. Only time will tell if same-sex marriage is the next milestone in the progression of American culture. Our collective history has shown that equality can be accomplished through tolerance. Despite our differences over lifestyles and beliefs we must live up to the principals of freedom put forth by our Founding Fathers, even if they didn't. Only then can we honestly claim to live in a country that offers liberty, and justice for all.

According to its theological definition the Rapture is: “a reference to the Biblical passage when in the ‘End Times’ the Christians of the world will be gathered together to meet their Savior Jesus Christ. The primary passage used to support the idea of the Rapture is 1 Thessalonians 4:15–7, in which the apostle Paul cites ‘the word of the Lord’ about the return of Christ to gather his saints....and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.”

Morgan Edwards is said to have been one of the first ministers to preach on the concept of the Rapture long before it was embraced by portions of the evangelical church. Born in Wales, Edwards attended and graduated from Bristol College before assuming the life of a full-time preacher in 1738. After pastoring churches in England for seven years, he moved to Ireland and led worship there for almost a decade before immigrating to the American Colonies. Upon his arrival in 1761, Edwards was appointed as the pastor of the Baptist Church in Philadelphia. While there he became the only clergyman from that denomination to side with the Tories during the Revolutionary War. ‘Toryism’ was a traditionalist and conservative political philosophy that was often embraced by those who remained loyal to the British Crown. In many cases Tories or Loyalists of any kind were branded as traitors and publicly humiliated or ridiculed. Edward’s position as a man of the cloth no doubt protected him from retribution.

Edwards left the pulpit in 1771 and became one of the most respected Christian historians of the day. Some Baptist scholars credit him as being the first of his denomination to record and publish chronicles of the church. In 1770 he finished his first major work titled Materials Toward A History of the Baptists in Pennsylvania presenting the origins of the Baptist Church in America and in 1792 he added a companion volume titled Materials Toward A History of the Baptists in New Jersey. He also wrote 42 volumes of sermons (12 per volume) that were never printed.

In 1764 Edwards joined a group of influential public figures (including the Reverends Manning, Stiles, Backus, Gano, Stillman, Ellery, as well as former Royal Governors Hopkins and Ward) in order to charter the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations which would later become known as Brown University. As an Ivy League school, Brown was the first Baptist College in the original thirteen colonies. Edwards died in Delaware in 1795 (Read funeral sermon) and was buried back near his church in Philadelphia. Most notable in Edward’s legacy as a minister was his progressive-teachings of the concept of “pretribulationism,” in which believers would be translated into Heaven prior to the events of the Tribulation as recorded in the Book of Revelations. In 1788 Edwards wrote that:

The distance between the first and second resurrection will be somewhat more than a thousand years. I say, somewhat more—, because the dead saints will be raised, and the living changed at Christ’s “appearing in the air” (I Thes. iv. 17); and this will be about three years and a half before the millennium, as we shall see hereafter: but will he and they abide in the air all that time? No: they will ascend to paradise, or to some one of those many “mansions in the father’s house” (John xiv. 2), and disappear during the foresaid period of time. The design of this retreat and disappearing will be to judge the risen and changed saints; for “now the time is come that judgment must begin,” and that will be “at the house of God” (I Pet. iv. 17).

Perhaps time will tell if Morgan Edwards was right. We now know that this past Saturday's anticipated "Judgment Day" (5/21/2011) failed to live up to many believers expectations. Perhaps they should have opened their bibles to Matthew 24:36 where it says that: “No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father."

George Cruikshank cartoon attacking Thomas Paine. The caption reads:
“The Age of Reason; or, the World turned Topsy-turvy exemplified in Tom Paine’s Works!”

Often referred to as the “Father of the American Revolution,” Thomas Paine was also THE best-selling author in eighteenth-century America. Even those with a casual knowledge of our nation’s history are familiar with his most popular work titled Common Sense. This of course was the radical political-pamphlet that he anonymously published (as “an Englishman”) in January of 1776. Common Sense presented the American colonists with an argument for freedom from English rule at a time when the question of independence was still being debated. Upon its release, Common Sense quickly spread among the literate and within three months, 100,000 copies were sold throughout the colonies.

Many people forget that Thomas Paine went on to write a highly controversial deistic-pamphlet titled The Age of Reason; Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology. This publication levied harsh criticism on the institution of organized religion and challenged the very legitimacy of the Christian Bible. Published in three parts over a period of three years (1794, 1795, and 1807), it was also a best-seller that ignited a short-lived deistic revival.

Much like Thomas Jefferson who wrote his own interpretation of scripture, Paine favored scientific-reason over faith and rejected all biblical references to miracles. While promoting the concept of “natural religion” he openly abandoned the notion that the Christian Bible was a divinely inspired book and argued against the very existence of a creator-God. By taking a philosophical stance that was usually reserved for the educated-elite and making it irreverent (and inexpensive), Paine was able to appeal to a mass readership, thus increasing sales while spreading his divisive message. Although (at the time) it did not sell nearly as well as Common Sense, The Age of Reason went through seventeen editions and sold thousands of copies in the United States.

Not surprising, Paine’s irreverent assumptions on organized religion (Christianity in particular) were met with much anger and outrage, especially from the Church of England. The British government reacted to this by prosecuting any printer or bookseller that tried to produce and/or distribute the book. The content of The Age of Reason was divided into three sections: In Part I, Paine outlined his major arguments and personal creed. In Parts II and III, he analyzed specific portions of the Christian Bible in order to demonstrate that it was not the revealed “Word of God.” Throughout the book Paine placed an emphasis on the individual’s right of conscience and an inherent accountability to be held to oneself. At the beginning of Part I, Paine summarized his personal creed:

I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.

I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.

But, lest it should be supposed that I believe many other things in addition to these, I shall, in the progress of this work, declare the things I do not believe, and my reasons for not believing them.

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise; they have the same right to their belief as I have to mine. But it is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.

In his argument against the Bible, Paine not only questioned the sacredness of the text, but also its historical origins. He often referred to the stories as “fabulous mythology” and stated that the Book of Proverbs was “inferior in keenness to the proverbs of the Spaniards, and not more wise and economical than those of the American Franklin [referring to Benjamin].” Paine then went on to question the overall consistency and accuracy of the Bible, blaming the errors on man as opposed to a divine being. Many of his comparative-reasoning styles are still practiced today in biblical scholarship.

The Old Testament in particular became a major target for Paine’s criticisms. He argued that the God of the Old Testament was so tyrannical and cruel that he could only be a “human-authored-myth.” He then went on to present a series of incidents supporting this theory including an account from the Book of Numbers, specifically 31:13–47, in which Moses orders the slaughter of thousands of boys and women, as well as the abduction of virgins. Excerpt: “15 ‘Have you allowed all the women to live?’ he asked them. 16 ‘They were the ones who followed Balaam’s advice and enticed the Israelites to be unfaithful to the LORD in the Peor incident, so that a plague struck the LORD’s people. 17 Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, 18 but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.’” Paine called this kind of content a “book of lies, wickedness, and blasphemy; for what can be greater blasphemy than to ascribe the wickedness of man to the orders of the Almighty!”

Another sentiment offered up by Paine was the distrust of religious institutions. This included the indicting of priests for their want of power and the Church’s opposition to scientific investigation. He recalled: “Soon after I had published the pamphlet ‘Common Sense,’ in America, I saw the exceeding probability that a revolution in the system of government would be followed by a revolution in the system of religion. The adulterous connection of Church and State, wherever it has taken place has so effectually prohibited by pains and penalties every discussion upon established creeds, and upon first principles of religion, that until the system of government should be changed, those subjects could not be brought fairly and openly before the world; but that whenever this should be done, a revolution in the system of religion would follow.”

Over the years many historians have supported to notion that Paine’s religious and political philosophies were very much in support of one-another. Therefore Paine felt that propagating a religious revolution was crucial to the success of any political revolution, not only because the Church controlled the State, but also because it required a radically new way of thinking and looking at the world. The threat to achieving this “political enlightenment” was directly attributed to a religious superstition that prevented oneself from diversifying their antiquated perspective or rejecting what they had been taught. Scholars have referred to this theory as Paine’s “secular-millennialism.” Perhaps Paine’s most telling statement on the subject of reform (religious and otherwise) came in the conclusion to his Rights of Man when he stated: “From what we now see, nothing of reform in the political world ought to be held improbable. It is an age of revolutions, in which everything may be looked for.”

Read The Age of Reason; Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology.