The Thomas Jefferson Hour; #0403; Listener Questions

Welcome to the Thomas Jefferson Hour, your weekly conversation with our third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson Hours produced by High Plains Public Radio and New Enlightenment Radio Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the search for truth in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson. Today's program was recorded in January 2004, covers several listener questions including the following topics, organic agriculture, when the majority is overwritten by the minority and Sally Himmings. Please join us as our host Bill Crystal speaks with Thomas Jefferson portrayed by humanity scholar Clay Jenkinson. Welcome to the Thomas Jefferson Hour. My name is Janie Guil and seated across from me as our third president Thomas Jefferson. Good day to you, Mr. Jefferson. Good day to you. Mr. Jefferson, today we have a host of listener questions to ask you. Are you prepared? I always enjoy finding out what is on the minds of the citizens of the United States. Well very good, well let's start with Bob Smith. Bob Smith said that he just saw a program that was

originally broadcast on television way back in May of 1998 and you were addressing children in the California Supreme Court and at one point you claimed to be a libertarian and Bob would like to know how do your views compare to those of a modern libertarian party? I think that the philosophy is essentially the same although the modern libertarians I think are more rigid and doctrinaire about it. Let me explain what a libertarian is first. A libertarian is somebody who loves liberty so much that he believes that government is an an evil albeit a necessary evil and that government should be paired down to do only those things which are directly enumerated in a constitution or other social compact and that government has no positive role in developing services or the fruits of life to its citizens that government's role is entirely negative that at best it's a kind of judge or arbiter between disputing parties and that the welfare of the people their old age pensions their

health the way they farm their business enterprises their individual expressions of liberty are entirely outside of the legitimate realm of government so I said or I'm said to have said that government is best which governs least that's a libertarian point of view but in my day the libertarians were I think more flexible than libertarians are in your day in your day libertarians espoused what I might call a doctrinaire position of government non-intervention I think there are two problems with that one is the inflexibility of it and the other is the unlikeliness of that to be useful in an industrial world when I was speaking as a lucky and libertarian back in the early 19th century the country was profoundly agricultural nine out of 10 people maybe 97 out of 100 lived on farms they were effectively self-sufficient they effectively lived outside of the economy they were able to feed and

code themselves under almost all social and political and international circumstances the technologies that they required for all of this were within the capacity of farm workers they could build a hay fork they could build a barn they could build fences drying rooms for tobacco so the economy was so simple then and so decentralized and the distances were so great and the and the self-reliant capacity of our citizens was such that not much government was needed but in your day somebody living not under those agricultural conditions would say in a city New York or Los Angeles that person is completely dependent for the basic goods of life on institutions that are beyond his control and a libertarian government therefore becomes problematic so if you had lived in the 1930s and 40s when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was our

president would you have approved of his new deal I don't know that's a very difficult question he thought that I would he you know he was a great advocate of my philosophy of democracy this all depends upon whether you look at the end product or the process involved if you look at the process and you say you want to be a Jeffersonian then you wind up being Herbert Hoover wanting no government intervention in the economy or the social structure even in extremity because the process the Jeffersonian process is that the government should be local decentralized and exceedingly limited and tied to the strictures of the Constitution that's the Jeffersonian process that works in my three mile per hour world although if Mr. Hamilton or even if Mr. Adams were here they might say I had to be flexible with it in order to govern even between 181 and 189 if you look at the end product what what you're

trying to bring about a classless society a society of equal opportunity a society in which natural capacity trumps the accidents of birth a society in which the fruits of life are roughly equally available to every able body and willing person that's a Jeffersonian end it's I suppose you'd call it social democracy or social equality and if that's your end then Jeffersonian processes may not work in an urban industrial world and what Franklin Delano Roosevelt decided as by the way did his relative theater Roosevelt late in his career was and this is a paradox that you can only bring about a Jeffersonian end by adopting Hamiltonian means that's the paradox of the 20th century that the Jeffersonians shifted sometime between 1941 and 1940

from process Jeffersonians into end product Jeffersonians and what they decided was that to bring about it Jeffersonian ends that they would make an accommodation with Mr. Hamilton's broad construction of the Constitution and his willingness to intervene in the economy thank you Mr. Jefferson this next question ties into what you've been talking about this question is from Robert Neenan and it's rather long so let me read it to you he says there seems to be a small increase in the public's interest in organic agriculture heirloom varieties of fruits and vegetables and slow food this trend has been very positive for a number of small farmers across the country Thomas Jefferson was a man of science and his experimental garden at Monticello was very impressive how might you have reconciled your support for technological progress with the impact of high tech agricultural on the family farm we have cheap and abundant food but we also have mad cows hormones in our hamburgers BST in our

butter antibiotics in our chickens and peaches that taste like cardboard I was raised on a farm and work in agriculture but I'm concerned about the slow demise of the family farm the quality of our food supply and the disintegrating connection between rural America and the rest of the nation I would appreciate your thoughts Mr. Jefferson what a lovely question I did not understand all of the alleged problems with your food supply mad cow and be us this or that in your fruits and vegetables none of those would have made any sense to me in my time but let me say first of all that the world must be fed the number one thing that is required in life is to be fed in the Garden of Eden Adam and Eve had themselves they were our first farmers which is one reason why I have such a deep fondness for agriculture in the family farm way of life the basic business of life for millennia has been to farm or to gather at some point there were enough agricultural surpluses so that there was formed a more abstract economy and one person farmed not just for

himself and his family but say for five others or three others and in some sense that freed up the three others to become poets and philosophers and statesmen in other words instead of having a nation of 1 million generalists each of whom is feeding himself we instead have a nation of specialists and one formal specialization is the food production system and then that liberates if you want to use that term other people to do other things David Hume or Mr. Madison certainly Mr. Hamilton would regard that as a great good I'm not so certain I think that maybe keeping people more closely tied to their agrarian roots to what this person is calling the organic is a good thing and that when we deviate very far from that natural base of our economy it produces corruptions corruptions of character corruptions of economic life and I think distortions of human happiness so I would be what might be called

the neo primitive the world began in agriculture it was moving into a kind of capitalist industrial order in my time I was a kind of classical pastoralists a believer in the agrarian dream and I would have wanted in a sense a retro grade commitment to family agriculture at least on some modest scale for all of our citizens it's been increasingly pointed out by historians that that dream that I had was not very realizable even in my own time and it's certainly not realizable in your time except for a handful of people but my point is that all agriculture in my time was organic and that agriculture's purpose is to feed and feeding people is the basic business of all civilization so of course I'm in favor of that and I think that we need to keep our focus on agriculture as the central business of the economy irrespective of where the dynamo of the economy might be moving at any given time or place so that in your time when you

live in what's called a dot com economy or a service economy or a speculative economy define it as you like a post-industrial economy I think that it would be who of all of you every day to have a secular form of grace in which you look at your food supply and you say to yourself I realize that the basic business of my life is about to happen I am about to ingest food and that food is is the earth's bounty for humanity without which there could be no civilization even in rudimentary forms and I feel rooted to the food that I'm about to eat I can imagine a secular prayer as you might put it or a secular grace that would keep urban and suburban people somewhat more rooted to the basis of life that's sort of a moral philosophical argument let me just change directions just quickly if the if the world must be fed and the world can be fed by a minority that's in a way good because it means that you have a good fortune in your time that no people on earth has

ever had most Americans who are listening to this program will never know hunger the possibility of genuine hunger or uncertainty about where their food is going to come is a virtual improbability for most people in your time so you have food security on an individual basis and on a national basis that is unprecedented in human history mr. Jefferson though the question was actually about organic food and organic processes for growing food I know and I don't believe I've done justice to this question but I so enjoy talking about agriculture and believe so strongly that in the primacy of agriculture that I couldn't help but digress a little about the moral nature of agriculture my basic points about industrial agriculture are these that whatever its problems and this gentleman has enumerated some of them basic health and safety of the food supply for example whatever the problems of this sort of industrial agriculture its benefits are

enormous it has it feeds the American people steadily cheaply bountifully that there's food security that's never been known in the history of the planet yes I would be concerned I'm sure in your time about the manipulations of the food supply the safety the basic goodness the aesthetics of the food supply I think he spoke of heirloom orchards and so on I'm sure that if I were a farmer in your time I would have historic seeds and that I would grow things that are entirely organic and that my concern would be what's the best tasting peach not can I produce more tonnage per barrel for the market because I basically approach the world aesthetically and I continually sacrificed agricultural profits at Monticello for whimsy for shelter belts for contour plowing for what might be called low end hybridization I had 29 varieties of pea in my

gardens I was constantly experimenting with things I wanted to have beautiful tastes I wanted I mean literally the sounds crazy but when I put a tomato into my mouth I wanted to have a deeply sensuous experience when I ate peas I wanted to be able to taste the subtleties of these peas and differentiate between an early spring variety of pea and an early summer variety of pea and and this is why I was enamored of French cuisine because the French have developed the French are the artists of civilization you know the British are not the British are beef and potatoes the French have developed cookery as aesthetic chemistry what they have done is provide sauces and slight tastes involving herbs and slices and chemistry of cooking at different temperatures and using separating the whites from the yolks and so on the French have developed an aesthetics of food so that their sauces are designed to bring out

the full joy of a meal whereas the British have gravy the French have sauce and I think it's a profound difference in the way that these two cultures go about things and so for me to grow something that is going to have an extraordinary aesthetic influence on my palate and that influence can then be heightened by the artistry of cuisine or cookery that's the good of life I want bred to taste amazing and I want my apples to be of different sorts so that I can taste a delicious one day and a South African the next and I can enjoy the subtleties of distinction that are available in your time you have made a trade and it's an unconscious trade I don't think the American people have really thought about it very much but you have traded the subtleties and the sensuality and the aesthetics of food for its abundance and its inexpensiveness

and you certainly have mastered abundance it's not clear that you have taste and I think that what one of the things that this gentleman is suggesting is is that a resistance to the industrial paradigm of food production and distribution and consumption automatically increases your sensual enjoyment of the most basic joy of life Mr. Jefferson another change would have to happen in America I believe the last survey showed that the typical American dinner sit down dinner is 11 minutes that's what ours went on for three hours or two hours literally now we had a large number of people and it was very low technology although I had lazy Susan doors and thumb weighters and other things to make it easier but we you know meals were social events in my time and I take what you're saying to to suggest that they're not social events in your time that the Americans basically feed rather than dying and that families

use food as a fuel system that's highly individualistic and atomized rather than as a social gathering for family conversation and family deliberation you know I don't know what to say about that you've built a you built a world in which the pace is extremely fast and each child of a family has its has his own mobility and and in a sense his own life and the family is is fissured in many interesting ways and so food becomes something that's done on the run between one project and the next performance or lesson that doesn't seem very interesting to me I think that the pace of your life has become frenetic but I think this is pace driven rather than aesthetically driven well there's two challenges that Americans face nowadays one is the abundance of different types of fast foods and the second thing is the pace with which we eat consequently we have a tremendous amount of obesity

in children and in adults and diabetes which is a disease I'm not sure was actually identified in your time is prevalent yes I mean one cannot jump out of the 18th century and parachute into the 21st century without being appalled by the physical conditioning of the American people it appears to me that you don't walk anymore that in my time people walked I mean literally the average person would have walked between three and 20 miles a day and and people who had serious economic lives would have walked sometimes 30 miles a day and so we were we were exercising by plucking chickens and churning butter and slaughtering cows and hauling hay and and grinding corn and wheat and and making barrels for the storage of all these products and lifting them I mean we had no locomotion steam was just beginning to be tapped at the end of my life and so everything was done by hand and hand labor automatically keeps your body

in balance so we had obese people Dr. Franklin was occasionally obese John Adams was fat I was never fat I was I was one of my observers said there that I was as spare as a man could be I walked four or five miles a day all of my life in road horses so you have to come at it in two directions your diet is very poor and it's certainly poor for sedentary people when mr. Jefferson we have to take a break but maybe one of these days you'll write a diet book for us I'd be I'd be happy to you are listening to the Thomas Jefferson hour with humanity scholar clay Jenkinson portraying Thomas Jefferson and his host Bill crystal a congregational minister in Reno Nevada the tech willow ruddery club is sponsoring an evening with the captains of the famous Lewis and Clark expedition on February 4th and 5th 2004 in Seattle, Washington humanity scholar clay Jenkinson will portray Captain Mary whether Lewis and Brian crawl of Las Vegas will portray Captain William Clark the Colorado endowment for the humanities is sponsoring an evening with the

first political couple John and Abigail Adams on February 19th 2004 in Denver, Colorado please visit our website www.th-Jefferson.org for additional information please stay tuned we will be back in just a moment welcome back to the Thomas Jefferson hour my name is Janie Gwell and seated across

me as our third president Thomas Jefferson mr. Jefferson we were in the first section talking about agriculture and organic agriculture we're closing that out and I need to go on to a few other listener questions so let me start with one by Douglas Pitner of Alexandria Virginia he writes recently the Massachusetts state Supreme Court ruled on state constitutional grounds in favor of the rights of a minority group this was in direct opposition to the majority opinion of the people of Massachusetts who are morally opposed to granting these rights many are arguing that being a democratic society we should respect the decision of the majority of the people of Massachusetts others are arguing that we were founded as a republic instead of a direct democracy in part to protect the rights of the minority against the simple majority recently I heard mr. Jefferson state that government exists to do your bidding

that the people are always right even when they are wrong so that your will whatever you decide should be enacted into law so how then mr. Jefferson does this view balance between the potential tyranny of the majority versus governing according to the will of the people and do you view the judiciary as the appropriate place to be resolving constitutional conflicts in such matters it's an interesting question notice that the actual issue has been suppressed and that we're talking in mere theory here which is sometimes good because it helps to have our constitutional philosophy straight before we begin to attend to specific cases the the medieval scholastic world developed a study of cases it's called casuistry and the history of casuistry is very interesting particularly with respect to the reformation and what casuistry did was look from case to case and to try to build a general philosophy from case study what this

gentleman is suggesting is to talk about constitutional theory and then go back and apply it to whatever case he has in mind and I think benefits can come from both directions but let me begin by saying that I am not a true russoian I do not believe that the people are always right even when they're wrong in other words I don't believe that mass democracy is inevitably wise I think that I inclined to the russoian view because I think that it's a good counterweight to the prevailing view which is that the people are mostly wrong and need to be governed like children and that's a Hamiltonian view so I'm enamored of the russoian ideal that the people's decided will must be respected I wouldn't go so far as to say automatically because I think that when we have a bill of rights as we do in the in the national constitution and in most state constitutions they those bills of rights enumerate an arena of human rights that governments cannot intrude upon so let's say

that at a time of war scare that 99% of the population would be glad to have censorship of the press because they believe that an uncensored press will lead to damaging revelations about the war effort even if 99% of the population wanted censorship during a time of war it would be unconstitutional because the bill of rights has specified that the right of the people to express themselves freely and without persecution is a fundamental human right and so you would hope then that somebody the executive or one of the branches of the legislature or a state legislature or a group of philosophers or college professors or the judicial branch of government would step in under such an abuse and say that censorship law violates the first amendment which guarantees people the right of free expression so you need reserved natural rights articulated in plain English and bills of

rights and when the majority for whatever reason wishes to trample upon those some entity or a body of citizens needs to step forward and remind the country of its foundation principles notice that i have not said that the judicial branch of government is inevitably the right one first of all i don't always credit them with virtue i mean the judiciary can be people by bad men just as well as by good men and people who hate liberty just as well as by people who love it so i don't think that the history of the courts is necessarily the history of advocates of the bill of rights and i'm frightened of putting such enormous power into the hands of such individuals particularly when they serve for life on good behavior but i also think that although i admire our system of checks and balances that i would prefer to put as little power into the judicial branch as possible because in doing so it effectively undermines the the spirit

of democracy which is that the people should correct their own abuses so i would rather see some some yeasty disorder so that let's say that the legislature passed a censorship law and i would have the judiciary branch say in our opinion this appears to be unconstitutional we strongly advise you to look through it again and to rethink it i would give them that much power but not veto power and then i would hope that a national debate would ensue and that the people would correct would would wake up and realize oh my goodness we almost broke one of our cardinal principles thank you supreme court for bringing it to our attention we will now revisit the law but if the people felt so strongly that the national security of the united states was at stake that they wanted to persist with that censorship law in spite of the recommendations of the court i would say that they are within their legal right to do so but the people would then be within their legal right to rebel and to try to overthrow that government certainly to vote it out at the next election so you see that my concept of checking balance against the tyranny of the

majority is not to give that power to the judicial branch of government per se and alone but rather to try to create the conditions under which we have a highly sophisticated and intelligent citizenship in which individual citizens alone and in groups will gather to to protest violations of their rights and that as i said many times in the course of my life the the answer to failed democracy is not to despair of it and try something else the answer is more of it because i believe that the failures of the majority will be short-lived and self corrected that the process itself has its own way of cleaning out its abuses i realized that that philosophy is not acceptable to many people because they would rather have a more certain an iron cland system but my fear of the judicial branch is so great that i am willing to put up with a little volatility in the process if we can keep the democratic or at least the republican spirit alive in that way so i do believe that when

there is a state or national constitutional convention the conferees carve out a set of reserved rights if one of those reserved rights is being trampled upon by the majority for whatever reason than i think there must be articulated and i suppose i would have to say institutionally based protests and that one legitimate branch of those protests would be the judicial systems in the state of the national government mr. Jefferson i have a question for you and that is regarding the right for same-sex partners to get married i take it that behind this question is same-sex marriage probably is it doesn't state that if your question is what do i think about same-sex marriages let me say that that this was not an issue in my time there was of course homosexuality there always has been homosexuality and undoubtedly always will be that homosexual behavior

occurs in other species we know from our study of orangutans in my time that it is quite prevalent in the higher primates of which we are one i think that any zoologist or anthropologist must accept that homosexuality is a fact of life amongst humans and the question then becomes what should the state do about it and i think that the answer essentially is that the state should turn a blind eye on private discrete acts of homosexuality between consenting adults it should tolerate them and it should not persecute them the state should protect innocent people children particularly from predation and that's of course not a homosexual issue but it involves homosexuality at times i would say then there certainly were homosexuals in my time i knew homosexuals but as long as their behavior was graceful and discrete and and was not offensive

in the public square then it seems to me the state has little or no legitimate interest in this and it should have a libertarian response effectively however i don't think that the state should give encouragement to non-fertil forms of human interaction in other words the reason for marriage originally at least was pro-creation was to reproduce the race and because reproduction has been prized particularly in rising societies like ours state has encouraged it by the sanctions of marriage i don't think the state has an interest in encouraging human sexual relationships that are non-reproductive and so i would say that the natural system of things is for the world to sort itself out heterosexualy 99 times out of 100 and that the other individual should be tolerated

but not encouraged mr. Jefferson your response feels sticky as if there's no separation between church and state and i know you didn't mention religion but it feels that way i can't see any religious energy in this in my response i think you in your time you might say well if if homosexuality is natural in in a certain minority of people then what's natural must be good and what's good must ought to be acceptable to the legislative branch i wouldn't have seen it that way i do believe that civilization is a difficult and fragile thing and that we create the conditions of enlightenment and civilization by hard work and that the the state should never discourage energies which are destructive to the health and security of the state and so tolerance i think is a much safer governmental attitude than persecution but i don't see any reason why the

state should encourage non-productive human sexual relationships and so i'm just trying to differentiate between persecution which of course has occurred through much of human history and tolerance which i think is a much more enlightened standard i don't have any religious feelings about this at all i i i look upon two individuals who are about to have sexual intercourse with each other in much the same way i would look at a bee and a flower or two heifers or in much the same way that i would look on a bee or a flower or cabbages in my garden or a bowl and a heifer mr japherson i guess when you use the words that having sex is for procreation that's what brings it into the religious realm for me because in our day you're not suggesting that there can be sexual pleasure outside of the procreative act mr japherson don't leave yourself open please well i i am not a puritan you know san augustin said that and i apologize to any younger listeners

but he said in heaven there will be no orgasm in heaven there will be the people will not lose control in orgasm that in heaven there will be sex but that the sex will involve orgasm as relaxation that at a certain point the man will relax his seed into the woman and that this will not involve ecstasy or chaos or orgeastic energies of any sort because this is this shows loss of control and passion that is not in keeping with human reason and so on i i don't subscribe to that i'm not a puritan i i understand sexual pleasure i understand that i've made the case earlier in this discussion for the deep pleasure of eating you know if you can take a deep pleasure in eating a peach or a french sauce or soup certainly you can take a deep pleasure in the flesh i don't get me wrong about this and i think that if homosexuals gain great sexual pleasure in their intercourse with each other i have no coral with that but i do think that the standard has to be the standard

of nature and if i had a garden in which a select number of cabbages just existed to be happy but refused to procreate little cabbages i would weed them out because i don't this doesn't do me any good i want fecundity i want i want offspring this is what we do with corn this is what we do with peaches this is what we do with apples and pears and strawberries and raspberries and hogs and chickens and with our cattle and if we had infertile cattle we would slaughter them i'm not suggesting that any any of these violent metaphors be applied to homosexual activity again my standard is tolerance but i don't think that it's in the interest of anybody to encourage activities in the social realm by law by constitutional protection that do not involve natural productivity and reproductivity mr. Jefferson this leads nicely into the next question from Sandra godwin she says mr. Jefferson i realize that you left nothing in writing regarding your

relationship with selling himmings but if i am not mistaken she was your wife's half sister and was most likely a quattroon which would have made her very light in color is it so hard to believe that she may have had a resemblance to your late wife with whom it appears that you were very much in love and also mr. Jefferson what do you think of fawn brodie's book and a net Gordon reads more recent work well first of all let me say that Sally himmings was a slave she was my property she had come to me by way of inheritance through my late wife's father john whales the himmings family had special status and although we would not have wanted to talk about so delicate an issue it was clearly the case that john whales had a black wife one himmings and that their offspring were mixed blood offspring and that Sally himmings would have been predominantly white in her blood partly negroid partly white and it is probably the case

although not certainly the case that she was the half sister to my beloved wife Martha my wife died in 1782 Sally himmings would have been a child of 10 or so years old in 1782 she came to Paris with my daughter Maria in the late 1780s as her shaperone she was then around 14 Abigail Adams who met her in London said that Sally himmings was so young and so innocent and unprepared for the role of shaperone that it it would be better she were just sent back immediately to the United States assuming for a moment that Sally himmings became my mistress later in life that would suggest that she was the half sister of my late wife who had been now dead for a number of years and it would indicate that she was predominantly white and although I won't say whether she bore resemblance to my wife it is the case that overseers and other observers said she was quote mighty

near white and that she had straight black hair and that she could pass as white and did pass as white after my death in 1826 so if the question is might I have been in love with mishemmings because she was in some regards a living embodiment of a wife that I had adored and who had died I'm not fond of that sort of psychological speculation but I leave it to our listeners to determine for themselves what they think of such a thing she was definitely not a black African people should disabuse themselves of that notion was it love was it opportunism was it mutual cynicism was it rape was it unfair in some sense was it a star cross love affair as Miss Brody suggests the kind of a shameful secretive deep 30 some year passion I'm not going to answer that question it's nobody's business but I will say that there are complexities to the story that should

explode in anyone's mind the notion of a slave white master having sexual congress with a jet black African girl mr. Jefferson this seems to tie in with the previous question in this case it would be one of tolerance you did not let's assume that you did have sexual relationships with Sally himmings you then chose to not marry her and with this we need to take a short break and we will be back in just a moment you are listening to the Thomas Jefferson hour with humanity scholar Clay Jenkinson portraying Thomas Jefferson the Tuck Willa Rudry Club is sponsoring an evening with the captains of the famous Lewis and Clark expedition on February 4th and 5th 2004 in Seattle Washington the Colorado Endowment for the Humanities is sponsoring an evening with the first political couple John and Abigail Adams on February 19th 2004 in Denver Colorado please visit our website www.th-Jefferson.org for additional information please stay tuned

we will be back in just a moment we will be back in just a moment welcome back to the Thomas Jefferson hour my name is Jane E. Quill and seated across to me is

humanity scholar Clay Jenkinson Clay good day to you I'm overhear squirming about Sally himmings you know it's such a great question I hope you'll go back to it and read a few pieces from it again people have a genuine and I think legitimate interest in this I mean we now are almost certain that Jefferson and Sally himmings had a number of children together and the idea that Jefferson who is a racist and a believer in the abolition of slavery would have a 30 some year relationship I mean how what marriage lasts 30 some years in our time 30 some year monogamous relationship with a slave that produced issue and that he freed the children of Sally himmings some during his lifetime and and summon his will that is naturally fascinating to people and the story was broken for our time for the late 20th century by Fawn Brody's book Thomas Jefferson and intimate history

and it was a scandalous book I remember that it wasn't sold at Monticello and people denounced it people that I greatly admire like Dumas Malone and and Merrill Peterson denounced it and denounced Fawn Brody for writing this book and said that it's preposterous that no decent or rational being could ever believe that Jefferson could have had a sexual relationship with Sally himmings and today if you go to Monticello it's accepted and it's virtually accepted throughout the Jeffersonian community there are still some diehards who don't accept it but basically everybody now accepts notion that Jefferson had a relationship with Sally himmings and and that if he didn't if it somehow proved technically that he didn't nobody doubts that he could have anymore whereas it used to be that just the opposite people said well technically maybe he could have but but you know psychologically or characteristically there's no way that he could have well now nobody doubts that anymore and so we've had a revolution in Jefferson studies and I think people have a legitimate

interest in this I just wish that I could say something worth saying first of all is Jefferson I can never go into this with great relish because he would have found this appalling I mean if there's one area that he would have said is absolutely off limits it's his private sexual life with his wife Martha or with anybody else and furthermore we don't know anything about it because Jefferson didn't write anything about it and Sally himmings didn't write and so we don't have any records to give us anything more than the tiniest inference from which everything else has to be spun out fly do you think though that Jefferson actually believes that sex is only for procreation I'm sure rationally he does you know I'm sure in his rational mind you know I got all balled up on this issue of homosexuality and let me just say as a kind of cultural commentator we are headed towards a breakthrough if you call it that you know it depends on your politics I suppose but we are homosexuality is going to be culturally protected and legitimized in my lifetime

and that is a huge revolution I mean we've had many revolutions in the last hundred years women have now achieved real equality not absolute equality but but real and substantial equality on almost every front and African-Americans are marching fast towards a much greater acceptance in this culture and you know as late as the 1960s there was still apartheid in this country there's still some evidence of it but it's basically over now you see white people who would never have allowed themselves to be on the same stage with an African-American now happily doing so and with real joy I think President Clinton actually gets some very high marks in this regard and we see that American Indians are having a cultural renaissance and political resurgence and now gay and lesbian behavior which has sort of been marching towards social tolerance and acceptance throughout

my lifetime is suddenly becoming culturally legitimized all over and there's going to be a backlash but I think that in the end this will people will realize I mean I think people will realize it doesn't really matter who sleeps with whom as long as they're consenting and they're responsible members of the community and what we know in spite of all the cultural stereotyping is that gay monogamous relationships are a form of stability that is frequently missing in the heterosexual community and that and that as a culture we need to prize stability and monogamy wherever it occurs whether across whatever sexual lines it goes and I think we're headed there now some people will violently disagree and I think Jefferson might disagree but the point of it is that we're heading in this direction and that really this is interesting because this is a David Hume argument and this is one you would find interesting Jenny because you come from a business background this was driven by business not by by law because people like Bill Gates

and other industrialists have realized that there's no easy way to deny insurance benefits to gay couples that if you go to work for Microsoft and you you have the right to ensure your spouse then why if you go to work for Microsoft do not have the right to ensure your live-in lover and if it moves from spouse to live-in lover then it's only a matter of time before it moves from heterosexual other to homosexual other or any other and so business drove this and once business drove this business told government look just get out of the way because this is a fight not worth having let's just let's just go in and and let's give benefits to everybody that qualifies within some minimal sense and and it'll be a lot cheaper and a lot less controversial and we'll just get on with the real work and that that we need our homosexual staff and if we're going to deny them benefits they'll go find work elsewhere and and so to be competitive we have to open this door and don't you think that this drove this debate oh I do I was working at Microsoft at the time that

Lotus a Northeast corporation made the decision to allow insurance benefits for any same-sex couples provided that you signed in affidavit saying that if it were allowable and legal for you to get married that you would do so and the ripple effect was incredible Microsoft scrambled to quickly catch up because the ramifications in the workforce was just enormous so let's just say that this is all true so far that basically the business community has driven this debate and that the legislative branches are reluctantly and slowly and agonizingly getting in line with it I think that's where we're headed certainly and that in my lifetime in the great majority of American states same-sex marriages will be fine that doesn't discount the sense of raw pain that that people of a traditional religious background feel about this issue you know if you are a Pauline Christian by which I mean a fundamentalist in any sense of the term and I think in a really

good sense as well as a bad sense this is a sticking point and there are lots of people if you watched what happened in the Episcopalian church there are lots of wonderful people I'm not talking about bigots but wonderful people who have a deep crisis of conscience over whether this is a good idea and they feel that the the sacred tradition is at best ambiguous on this question and probably antagonistic to this and that this is a shocking change in the way that social cultures display themselves and they frankly wonder whether this might not be one of those terrible mistakes that cultures sometimes make if they wish to be godly and I don't for a minute discount the concerns that these people have in fact I have a deep respect for their concerns because they come so they're thwarting those zeitgeist I mean the zeitgeist is clearly do what you feel like and I respect anybody who's willing to stand up in a principled way and say you know what tempting though

that would be and and I don't want to appear to be a jerk but I do think that the things I hold most dear in life the restraining system which is the one that I regard as the central one of my tradition seems to me to discourage or prohibit this sort of activity I think there's a legitimacy to that I might disagree with it politically and socially but I like the fact that people are still arguing from tradition instead of just saying whatever floats your boat which appears to be the philosophy of our time you know whatever floats your boat is in the minds of the mass of people an acceptable ethical national approach and I don't believe that's true I do feel sorry there I have a friend who's 80 years old and she just left the church over the gay bishop issue and here's a woman who's gone to church all her life and her view was don't put it in front of me it goes back to Jefferson's view of tolerance don't ask don't tell is basically Jefferson's view

that's exactly how she felt about it and I'm watching her struggle with religion right now at 80 years old and I just say oh my gosh by that time you should be through the struggles well this is not the first time you know that I mean I remember I don't know if you remember this or not Janie but in the 1960s the the mainline Protestant social democratic churches like congregationalism and methodism and and Presbyterianism and so on began to advocate black rights they would commit themselves to leftist anti-war movements or to international health delivery systems as opposed to missionary systems and they would get behind Angela Davis or or some other very controversial leftist national figure and these racked the churches because conservatives and these churches thought as I'm a Presbyterian I'm a I'm a little Presbyterian from a small town in Minnesota and I'm a conservative and the god of Calvin is my god and I don't like my church some national

part of my church telling me that we're going to support Cambodian refugees or that we're going to support gay rights or the rights of women or the or the ERA remember when that had the same ability to shock that this issue has in our time and and I feel so sorry for these people because they're just nice people who want to worship god and they didn't sign on for the social upheavals that their national churches were leading them into and I think that the case you point to is a sad case but I do believe that the Episcopalian church has bent over backwards to try to do this decently and intelligently and sensitively rather than just saying deal with it. But I think we should spend just a moment and talk about the history of it. I believe in England in the 1800s and prior to that it was an entitled buggery and it was a capital offense. Yeah it's still a capital it's not a capital offense but it's still an offense in some states in the United States but these are Sodomy laws but keep in mind that Sodomy laws are different

from homosexuality. Homosexual behavior between consenting adults is different from Sodomy which which is perceived in most statutes to be predatory sexual congress between a predatory male and a submissive younger male or submissive somebody and so the laws are driven by two things and they when they still are we're still in this dilemma. They're driven partly by traditional antagonism to homosexuality and there's still plenty of that a wash in the land and then they're driven by the natural desire to protect the innocent. You know you see this in the debate now and I think the most extreme of the United States senators on this question said earlier this year or late last year that if you can allow same sex marriages then why not brother and sister and why not parent and child and where will it stop it's kind of a slippery slope argument but in a sense that's true in a sense if you decide that the state really has

no legitimate interest in deciding with whom you have sexual pleasure then how do we protect the truly innocent the nine-year-old or the 12-year-old from the uncle or father the boy in a social club from the mentor the why not just have cousin on cousin and brother and sister if consent is the only issue why do we decide that incestuous relationship shall be outlawed or that an 18-year-old can have sex but a 17-year-old can't by statute these are very difficult and are basically arbitrary determinations but you know that they're designed to protect the innocent to protect the impressionable from the seducer and the stronger person in the culture I think it's worth our remembering that these are not arbitrary in the sense that someone sat down and said watch me legislate these are painful earnest attempts by the culture to decide what is out of bounds and I think what we're finding is that consensual homosexual activity is no

longer widely seen as out of bounds play thank you very much we're going to have to wrap up in just a second I want to clarify one thing when you were talking as Jefferson I believe you said that Martha Jefferson's father had married a black woman that he had a black wife you meant he had a black mistress is that correct yeah he had a black and she wasn't even fully black but Betty Hemings the progenitor of all these Hemings children was a slave that was the basically common law wife I think John Wales had three white wives they all died and then he took up with Betty Hemings and had more children by her including the famous Sally Hemings oh so it was after his wife passed away yes interesting we'll save this for another day but what do you think about strom I think strom thermons fathering a black or mixed blood child is one of the great cases of situational irony in human history and that I think it just makes everyone smile in some way Clay thank you very much we must end today's program thank you for listening to the Thomas Jefferson hour with

humanity scholar Clay Jenkinson today's program was produced by Janie Guil and edited by Ian Anderson the tech willow rotary club is sponsoring an evening with the captains of the famous Lewis and Clark expedition on February 4th and 5th 2004 in Seattle Washington at Foster High Performing Arts Center humanity scholar Clay Jenkinson will portray Captain Maryweather Lewis and Brian Crawl of Las Vegas will portray Captain William Clark again the date for this exciting reunion of the captains is February 4th and 5th 2004 in Seattle Washington please visit our website www.thythonjeperson.org for additional information the Colorado Endowment for the Humanities is sponsoring an evening with the first political couple John and Abigail Adams on February 19th 2004 in Denver Colorado humanity scholar and minister Bill Crystal will portray the gregarious founding father John Adams the second president of the United States Mandy Dica Louisville Kentucky will portray the

lively and outspoken Abigail Adams wife to John Adams and mother to the sixth president of the United States John Quincy Adams please visit our website www.thythonjeperson.org for additional information music for the Thomas Jefferson hour was provided by Steven Swinford Reno Nevada you can visit mr. Jefferson's homepage on the worldwide web at www.thythonjeperson.org again our website is www.thythonjeperson.org to donate $9 and receive a copy of today's program or to ask mr. Jefferson a question free of charge please call 1-888-458-1803 again the number is 1-888-458-1803 the Thomas Jefferson hour is produced by high friends public radio and new enlightenment radio network a nonprofit organization dedicated to the search for truth in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson thank you for listening and we hope you join us again next week for another entertaining historically accurate and thought-provoking commentary through the eyes of Thomas Jefferson