Now and then, a statement made in the present echoes a statement from the past that had grave repercussions.
Here’s the recent statement:
Kelley Robinson, President of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), spoke at a kickoff event for the Democratic National Convention last week and denigrated the Bill of Rights, calling it ” a little piece of paper.”
The Human Rights Campaign is America’s largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer civil rights organization.
Robinson said during the DNC LGBTQ+ Kickoff event that the U.S. needs to rethink “freedom” in a more “revolutionary” way than when the Founding Fathers created a “little piece of paper.”
Robinson even suggested that “we can’t just worry about protecting democracy at this moment” but should “reimagine it with people that look and love like us at the center.”
“And I think for us right now, it’s about reimagining freedom and this American story in a way that is more revolutionary than what our founders actually put down on that little piece of paper, but instead is the type of democracy that’s by and for all of the people of this country,” she said.
There’s already been a lot of outrage voiced about this denigration of the one of the two founding documents of the American constitutional republic. But outrage gets us nowhere. Rather, let’s look back a few years… almost exactly 110 years, in fact. I speak of the last days before the eruption of World War I, the greatest human tragedy on record. The German Empire was resolved to invade France. Its planned invasion route was through Belgium. However, a treaty negotiated decades earlier, to which Germany was a party, made Germany co-guarantor of the neutrality of Belgium! That treaty obliged Great Britain to enter the coming war against Germany, for Britain was another co-guarantor of Belgian neutrality. That displeased Kaiser Wilhelm II and his ministers greatly, for they saw Britain as a “kindred nation.”
When it became clear that Britain took Belgian neutrality and its co-guarantor status seriously, the Chancellor of Germany, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, had a most unfortunate thing to say:
In Berlin, the British ambassador, Sir Edward Goschen, presented the ultimatum in a historic interview with the Chancellor. He found Bethmann “very agitated.” According to Bethmann himself, “my blood boiled at this hypocritical harping on Belgium which was not the thing that had driven England into war.” Indignation launched Bethmann into a harangue. He said that England was doing an “unthinkable” thing in making war on a “kindred nation,” that “it was like striking a man from behind while he was fighting for his life against two assailants,” that as a result of “this last terrible step” England would be responsible for all the dreadful events that might follow, and “all for just a word—‘neutrality’—just for a scrap of paper….”
[Barbara W. Tuchman. The Guns of August]
Historian A. J. P. Taylor called this “one of the most terrible things that has ever been said.” I must agree… and here it is being said again, about one of the most important documents in the history of Mankind.
If there were any true justice, Kelley Robinson would be tarred, feathered, and thrown out of the country. But… well, I’ll let my Gentle Readers form their own opinions.
