This is why I despise the argument used by some to follow the "original intent" of the Founding Fathers, and which they were bound by the political constraints and realities of their epoch, and the document they crafted reflect as such.

Safe to say it's 2012. Not 1787. We consider slavery to be sorta wrong, yet it was considered status quo acceptable back then. (Whether acceptable evil to placate the southerners, and protect Founding Fathers' own capital investment in slave labor like Washington.)

To say the least, nobody in America craves slavery's comeback. Also when was the last time the government forced troop quartering in your house during peacetime? After 1787, that "contemporary issue" has never mattered what so ever for Americans. You definately won't meet a modern conservative who gives a shit about it.

Of course the irony was that despite the heavy disapointing flaws of Washington or Jefferson or Franklin and so forth, they were much more broadly intellectually open in the matters of religion and science. Secularists tend to literally interpret Jefferson's view on church & state, and the religious special interests hijack his religiousity as a post-mortem stamp of approval for their policies.

Which of course ignores the fact that Jefferson was (publicly at least) a very devout man who also was a devout follower of science. And he didn't see any conflict what so ever between the two. If anything, he took the correct Christian view of science: a field of study in trying to figure out how God does his job.

I like to believe he would vomit and vomit if he saw the current American religious right. If not for their insistence of replacing science with theology (instead of hybriding the two), he would be despaired at their championing of ignorance.

(Of course as much as I admire Jefferson, he at times failed by his own intellectual standards like believing the French Revolution was the European continental American Revolution. Which it wasn't, and he was unfortunately blind to it. Nor unfortunately him using pseudo-science bullshit apparently to excuse his own practice of slavery.)