"I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."
What would Thomas Jefferson think of the 2015 version of the country he worked so hard to found?
On the day Jefferson replaced John Adams he immediately moved to correct Federalist abuses of power by freeing everyone who had been imprisoned or was being prosecuted by Adams' Alien and Sedition Acts. Jefferson freed everyone without asking what the accused had supposedly done or against whom they had supposedly offended.
The Federalists were sort of a precursor to modern day reactionary conservatives. Thomas Jefferson was the first Democrat president, though at the time his party was known as the Democratic-Republicans.
What would Jefferson think of Texas? And the Republican controlled Texas legislature, with the Republicans controlled by the gas and oil industry lobbyists who got their stooges to pass HB 40, banning towns like Denton, Texas, or any other town in Texas, from enacting local regulations regulated gas drilling activity in their towns?
Denton's voters had voted to ban gas drilling and fracking in their city limits.
But, in modern day Republican controlled Texas you can not have that sort of citizen empowered democracy determining what happens in your town.
Well.
Denton has given us a new American Hero.
A 92 year old woman named Violet Palmer, hard of seeing, but strong of conviction.
Violet Palmer, a woman Thomas Jefferson would be proud to call an American, believes it is ones moral responsibility to disobey the law when the law is wrong, when the law is impinging upon ones right, when the law is corrupted by a corrupted system.
Violet Palmer staged a protest at a Denton gas pad site that was back fracking after the Republicans took away Denton's right to self determination.
Violet Palmer was taken into custody and booked into jail on Tuesday.
What would Thomas Jefferson think of American police arresting a 92 year old partially blind woman engaged in peaceful protest, that being one of the rights Jefferson labored to have included in the American Constitution?
I suspect Thomas Jefferson would have suggested that the Denton police and other citizens of Denton join Violet Palmer in her non-violent protest.
Arresting any person engaged in exercising their right to peacefully protest anything their beliefs compel them to protest is anti-American in the Thomas Jefferson version of America.
To arrest a peacefully protesting 92 year old semi-blind woman, is, well, evil and embarrassing.....
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