Protesters have Jeffersonian roots

Paul Michel Albemarle County
Published: July 22, 2008

I would respectfully disagree with the author of “Protester needs to learn history” (The Daily Progress, July 18), who claims in his letter that Thomas Jefferson had nothing to do with our Constitution because he was in France at the time it was written.

As one element of our re-search for the National His-tory Day Contest, the Monti-cello/Albemarle History Team (Samantha Lin, Kaya Berne, Mohammad Rasool, Art Con-ley and I) interviewed historians from Berkeley to the University of Virginia about Thomas Jefferson’s role as a Founding Father. All of the scholars concurred that Jeffer-son and
James Madison were of one mind on the Bill of Rights, and that the First Amendment was inspired by Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.

There is no doubt in my mind that Jefferson would have supported the protest of the current administration’s consistent erosion of our constitutional rights.

The nature of protest is that it is often irritating and inconvenient; how else would it get any attention from a media circus that offers scandal and superficial punditry as news?