Thomas Jefferson spent years raping his slave Sally Hemings... - part deux

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christiefan915 said:
... and a new novel treats their relationship as a love story." (Was Jefferson a child molester? a rapist? both? My comment.)

A new historical novel about Thomas Jefferson is raising eyebrows.

Stephen O’Connor’s Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings, which came out on Tuesday, is about our third president’s relationship with Sally Hemings, his slave. DNA evidence has proved that Jefferson and Hemings had six children together while Jefferson kept Hemings enslaved — and Jefferson also enslaved their children, freeing them one by one as they came of age. To further complicate matters, Sally Hemings was a half-sister to Jefferson’s late wife, the product of a relationship between Jefferson's father-in-law and one of his slaves.

By all accounts, Jefferson’s sexual relationship with Hemings spanned several decades, beginning when Hemings was a teenager and Jefferson was in his 40s. It was not, in any sense of the word, consensual: Hemings was a child, and Jefferson literally owned her; she was not in any position to give or withhold consent. What Jefferson did to Hemings was rape.

But Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings, judging from early reviews, is most interested in exploring potential ambiguities of their relationship. The book wonders: Did Hemings perhaps enjoy it? To what extent was she complicit?

According to Kirkus, in this novel Hemings enthusiastically consents to the relationship: "And so, when some half hour after Sally Hemings arrives late at the upstairs parlor, and Thomas Jefferson confesses breathlessly that he would very much like to lie with her as a man lies with his wife … she whispers that she would like that, too. …"

NPR quotes a passage in which she whispers ecstatically to Jefferson, "I want us always to be as we are here … where we are only our eyes, our hands, those parts of us made for each other by nature, where our only words are the ones we whisper in the little caves we make between pillow, cheek and lips."
The Washington Post cites O’Connor’s assertion in the afterword that "Hemings’s feelings for Jefferson might well have fallen somewhere along the spectrum between love and Stockholm syndrome..."

...These early reviews are, by and large, positive. The book shows "The agonizing crashing together of love and slavery," writes NPR, observing that "O'Connor has the insight to put them side by side, and the result is searing and even sometimes beautiful." The Washington Post, which acknowledges that the book’s treatment of Hemings leads to its "most troubled and troubling chapters," concludes that "O'Connor's deeply humane treatment of Sally, whose actual thoughts will never be known to us, is the novel's most haunting accomplishment..."

(Continued)

http://www.vox.com/2016/4/8/11389556/thomas-jefferson-sally-hemings-book
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Christy----------------->:bdh:
 
you can't judge people as bad for living in a time where all of society told them something was perfectly normal.

Maybe in 200 years scientists find out all animals have higher levels of consciousness than we now know, and they will all consider us genocidal animal killers.

I don't judge people so far in the past. Morality is not absolute.
 
Jefferson is considered the father of the Democratic Party. In the modern era, she would at least have pursued him for sexual harassment.
 
The Prince said:
you can't judge people as bad for living in a time where all of society told them something was perfectly normal.

Maybe in 200 years scientists find out all animals have higher levels of consciousness than we now know, and they will all consider us genocidal animal killers.

I don't judge people so far in the past. Morality is not absolute.
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1) I would still say so the fuck what?
2) Morality is absolute. Henry VIII will burn in hell just as assuredly as a contemporary man who conspires to murder his wife.
 
nope, morality is a fiction, completely made up based on our feels. the universe doesn't care what you do. We are so incredibly irrelevant if you genocided the whole planet it wouldn't make the slightest difference
 
Milagro said:
You are a racist now along with your bum chum Legion.
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Okay Pee Wee,
i_know_you_are_pee_wee_herman.gif


Poor Borbo Pee Wee
 
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