September 16 was Constitution Day in America. But judging by what some college kids at Georgetown University think about our founding document, they may well have been celebrating “Meatless Friday.”
Campus Reform grabbed their video camera and paid a visit to one of the top undergrad schools in the country to ask kids what they thought of the Constitution. What they found is appalling.
Campus Reform asked Georgetown students, who have an average SAT score of 1460 and a high school GPA of 4.01, what they thought of the document George Washington said he would “never abandon.” They overwhelmingly disagreed with the nation’s first president and Revolutionary War hero.
Some of the responses by young “Hoyas,” include:
- “People definitely take [the Constitution] too seriously, it’s not 250 years ago.”
- “When it was written, we were considering things that absolutely don’t apply today.”
- “I feel like sometimes people use the Constitution as an excuse to not think and to not work towards progress.”
- “I come from North Carolina. There are a lot of people in that area who I think take the Constitution too seriously.”
- “The Constitution itself and a lot of the amendments are probably taken a little bit too seriously.”
- “Sometimes we’re afraid to think, I don’t know, in more utopian ways.”
- “We have to keep updating like we would anything after, you know, like, the dictionary is updated once a week.”
Ironically, the nonprofit group’s video brings to mind a famous story about Ben Franklin being asked what form of government the delegates at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia agreed upon in 1787. His answer: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
Georgetown students were not shown giving specifics as to which limits on federal power are taken “too seriously,” if they knew the proper amendment process, or which aspects of the Bill of Rights “don’t apply today.”
Sorry, Ben. We blew it. We allowed a bunch of illiberal authoritarians to capture our educational system to brainwash young people into believing that placing limits on government power was evil and that the founders shouldn’t be admired because they were mostly slave-owning rich white men who oppressed the common man.
Barack Obama is their proudest achievement. No one has done more in my lifetime to undermine constitutional government than he — including Richard Nixon. His surveillance of Americans made Nixon’s bugging seem like child’s play. He has made war without congressional approval three times over, surpassing Nixon’s minor incursion into Cambodia. He has used the executive agencies of government to intimidate and silence his critics. And his rule by decree makes a mockery of representative government.
No one should be surprised at the attitude of those college students toward the Constitution. They had great teachers — and an excellent role model in the president of the United States.
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