Lincoln Redux

Although I am waiting in anticipation for Steven Spielberg's movie on Lincoln based on Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals, an opinion piece published on The Daily Caller gives me pause.  Even though Spielberg is a liberal (which makes him prone to historical deconstruction among other futile modern academic exercises) I think he still would be fairly faithful in trying to capture Lincoln as he understood himself.  Now I am not so sure.  Consider this from Mark Judge on screenwriter Tony Kushner:

New York [magazine] asked Kushner whether he thought Lincoln — “that original Log Cabin Republican” — would be a Republican today. “Absolutely not,” said Kushner. “He was a deeply progressive man and a deep believer in the Constitution. Any party that could make George Bush, who has raped the Constitution, is not one that Abe Lincoln would want anything to do with.” And if he were alive today, Honest Abe would be all about Obama: “They’re both from Illinois. You can really trace a line from the politics of Lincoln through American pragmatism to the politics of Barack Obama.” If that’s not enough, Kushner informs us that Lincoln was most likely gay. “I’m struggling with that question while I’m writing it. The historical record is very cloudy. There’s possibly some evidence he was bisexual at least.”

Kushner, himself a gay man, was behind the play Angels in America, which featured one scene where Roy Cohn was visited by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg on his deathbed. Rosenberg's ghost takes pleasure in Cohn's slow death (Cohn previously worked with Senator Joe McCarthy to out suspected communists, which included Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, working within the U.S. government). Never mind the fact that in 1995, old Soviet documents were declassified and "revealed that Julius was indeed a spy who had passed vital national security information to the Soviets, much more than originally thought, and that Ethel was at least an accomplice."

As Judge points out, Lincoln's politics revolved around the natural law and natural rights principles of the Declaration of Independence. Adherence to the natural law, a set of permanent unchanging standards about right and wrong, just and unjust, is what makes this county unlike any other. No other people have based their government upon truths accessible to anyone of the human species. Lincoln's teachings (and the Founders teachings) are an anathema to much of modern liberalism and even some of the teachings of modern conservatism.

Having Kushner as the screenwriter certainly does not inspire confidence that the true importance of Lincoln will be examined.