Lincoln's Legacy and the Fight Against Modern Slavery
Whenever I read such things as "Why the Founding Fathers Wouldn't Have Been Anti-Vaxxers," I cringe a bit. Not only are these rather desperate speculations, but they are supercilious: We know the things the Founders were for and against, and to infer from their stated convictions and known actions their allegiance to or antipathy toward a contemporary political issue trivializes these remarkable men and the causes for which they fought and, in some cases, died.
So, on this 150th anniversary of the death of Abraham Lincoln, we should be loath to claim this greatest of all Americans for causes near and dear to our own hearts. Lincoln, the tax-cutter; Lincoln, the defense hawk; Lincoln, the champion of litigation reform – these and a hundred other tinny appellations clank against the edifice of historical integrity.
And yet: How can we not assume that someone whose life became a testament to the fight for human dignity and the liberty attendant to it would be an active opponent of the trafficking of persons in our time? The man who wrote in 1864, "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I cannot remember when I did not so think, and feel," surely would have been appalled by and actively opposed to the forcible commercialization of some human beings for the sexual and often perverse pleasure of others.
