If you liked the Crossfire episode where Lofton accused pop stars of encouraging our kids to have sex with animals, you're gonna love this interview he does with James Stengel when he was the head of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia (Stengel, that is, not Lofton). You're especially gonna love the fit he throws over a skit put on at the center illustrating the 3rd amendment that featured a man in drag:
JL: (laughing) Well, that's one thing we agree on. Have you seen your Bill of Rights exhibit for the children?RS: I have.
JL: Do you remember the Third Amendment part, the little skit about quartering troops in American homes?
RS: Well, I'm familiar with the Third Amendment, yeah.
JL: I saw it, took pictures of it, a video of it. You say you did see it? Do you remember -- let me get to the point. In that skit there's a "woman" pushing a vacuum cleaner and there's a little kid -- looks like a little girl -- in a camouflage outfit and she asks her "Mom" if she could build a fort in the living room and her mother says "No, no, no troops in the house." Are you aware that the "woman" is a man in a dress?!
RS: I -- you know, I have a vague recollection of that part of the show, but I don't recall that specifically, no.
JL: Yeah, I was, and am -- shocked by this. The minute the "woman" spoke I knew it was a man's voice. And then they have a grand finale number where everybody's facing the audience and it's obvious that this "woman" is a guy in a dress, with curlers in his hair! You don't remember that?!
RS: I saw it a long time ago, John, I mean -- what is so, tell me what your point is?
JL: (laughing) Well, I guess my point is that a.) Men ought not to wear dresses and (b) why in the world would this be in a skit where children see it? -- or anybody for that matter?
RS: John, your interpretation of the Constitution is it un-Constitutional for a man to wear a dress?
JL: Let's see now -- is it un-Constitutional for a man to wear a dress? It...certainly is un-Biblical. Deuteronomy 22:5 says that men ought not to --.
RS: Well, un-Biblical is different than un-Constitutional.
JL: Well, I think it's a little higher law, don't you?
RS: I -- what else would you like to talk to me about?
JL: So, if it is a man in a dress, you don't really care about that?
RS: I'm not, uh, we -- we have many things you and I could talk about the Constitution, about the National Constitution Center. To worry about a fleeting image -- in something, which I don't even know if it's true -- it's not something that's very high on my radar I have to say.
JL: What can I say? Maybe you need more sensitive radar. I don't know. That's my opinion. One of the things I thought is that the way the Bill of Rights were taught in that exhibit -- with all the skits and everything -- this might leave the impression with children that the Bill of Rights is not a bery serious subject. But, quartering troops was a very serious thing. It's listed in the Declaration of Independence. British troops raped our wives and daughters, stole food. It's just not a joking matter.
RS: I don't think it is either. This is a show for small children, about the Bill of Rights, something that most children don't even know about at all. One of our visions of our place is to entice interest amongst school children to learn something about American history, that -- you know that there's a historical illiteracy in American and we are trying to combat that. I think if we were talking about that to six-year olds in a very serious and somber way, we could assure ourselves that they're not going to learn anything about it. So the whole idea of the show is to package it in an appealing way that they're used to from television, and cartoons so that they might begin to understand some of those individual liberties that many men and women sacrificed for for hundreds of years. That is a privilege of living in the United States. That's what we're trying to accomplish.
JL: Oh, absolutely. And I don't in any way dispute your goals. I guess I was questioning the method of teaching -- that if it's taught in the kind of frivolous jokey, cartoonish manner that maybe that doesn't impart the degree of seriousness that ought to be taught.
Finally, I thought the Christian origins of our country and our form of government and our founding documents was pretty much given short shrift and pretty much ignored [at your Center.]
Shhh. No one tell him that the founding fathers wore wigs and frilly blouses.
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Oh no! Hide the childrens!
http://i1.tinypic.com/oadoa1.jpg
Excellent! It's a sort of self-selection programme for idiots - mention something trivial but biblically verboten and if the subject gets his knickers in a twist they can comfortably be filed in the 'never need to pay any attention to this fool's opinion ever again'. Sort of like being a Scientologist.
And as an Englishman I feel rather disappointed that there was raping and pillaging going on and I missed it. Bugger.
I would guess that Lofton is no fan of Monty Python.
Actually, Tacitus, he sounds rather like he's a character from Monty Python!
I don't see how anyone can arrive at thinking like that which is displayed above. It is scary when taken to it's conclusions.
I would guess that Lofton is no fan of Monty Python.
Oh, I don't know about that. He seems to have cribbed his interviewing style from the Pythons.
Go back and watch Michael Palin's interview with Terry Jones and John Cleese as archaeologists, where Palin refuses to ask about archaeology, but harps on the fact that Jones is short and Cleese is tall.
Or the interview with Arthur "Two Sheds" Jackson.
Deep inside, Lofton has Python Envy.
At the risk of making a gigantic ass out of myself, I have to ask.
John Lofton intends his remarks to be humorous, right? Like a Jon Stewart?
Oy, I think Mr Stengel chickened out on that "Well, I think it's a little higher law, don't you?" line. He should have just come right out and said, "As far as the governance of this nation is concerned, no, it's not." Aside from that, he made a rather valiant, if futile, attempt to keep the discussion on a Constitutional track.
ROTFLMAO...When I run this through my "tact & etiquette" translator, it comes back as, "My lord but you're an idiot!"
ROTFLMAO...When I run this through my "tact & etiquette" translator, it comes back as, "My lord but you're an idiot!"
"Well, I think it's a little higher law, don't you?"
This sort of thinking leads people to fly aeroplanes into skyscrapers killing lots of people. I hope this isn't considered an excessively tasteless example, but I think it's valid.
DID British soldiers quartered in colonists' homes really rape the women? I've never heard such allegations before. (I can imagine them raping black or Indian women at that time, but white women would have been another matter.) I'm not a history major, but I think I'd remember such a story had I heard it.
I guess JL wasn't a fan of Schoolhouse Rock.
Or Shakespeare.
So is there any indication that it actually was a man in drag, or is he just talking out of his ass? I can take a guess...
You know -- and while I am sure it's happened once or twice -- I have never seen a pundit get up-in-arms over women wearing men's clothes. I think if these pundits had a choice to complain about one or the other thing, they would invariably chose the guy in a dress (I can certainly attest to the possibility (however unlikely) that dame Sandra Bernhardt is really a man, but has Lofton complained there?). This is of course not counting the fact that someone SHOULD have gotten on Lofton's case for not even attempting to back up his claim of a man in a dress, but just his mere implication of this being so. It's easy to see why Stengel was trying to keep to the topic he was on the show to do and not let Lofton poise himself on a bible.
Python-envy? Cutting a little too close to the mark, I think. The measure of insecurity in the need to portray men in pants and ties and suits makes one suspect that any of these pundits is afraid ... really afraid ... and of nothing in particular.
I would guess that Mr. Lofton is not a fan of the greatest entertainer of all time, Mr. Milton Berle.
I think the one about the Brits pillaging, raping and looting was lifted from the movie "The Patriot" which also had the Brits herding all of the townspeople into the local church and burning it. (All of which shows Mel knows history like he knows theology like he knows who really runs this country and the world).
British soldiers were under military law and while the officers may not have cared if colonists were raped or brutalized, they were concerned about discipline and that meant if the troops did rape, pillage and plunder, it was under proper orders and supervision.
Condie Rice, having rewritten WW2 with "werewolf units" of guerrillas attacking US troops in postwar Germany at least until 1948, now rewrites history by comparing the Iraqi war to the Civil War (does this make Chalabi Butterfly McQueen?) If we are to rewrite history in our own images, we must first destroy the history of what actually happened.
Thanks, entlord, for the reply. But wasn't that scene you mentioned from "The Patriot" a synagogue getting torched, not a church? Or did a church get torched too?
My totally inexpert guess here (aside from Mad Mel making shit up), is that there may have been consensual affairs between white women and the soldiers quartered in their houses. Mutual desire would have been probable, and opportunities unmissable. A woman who was found out would call it "rape" to avoid being called a slut ("I closed my eyes and thought of England! Honest!"); her husband would agree to avoid being called a cuckold; the army would discipline, or kinda pretend to discipline, the errant soldier; and everyone would just shut up about it from then on.