The Moral Equivalent of Opening Fire On Ft Sumter

Last night as I was dropping Cami off at work, the news broke that the State of Maine had joined Colorado is removing Trump from their ballot. The stated justification for this was, of course, the infamous 14.3.

In so may ways, I feel as if I have been somehow transported back to April of 1861. After Abraham Lincoln was kept off the ballot in numerous slave states and won anyway, there was some hope that rational men could reach reasonable accommodations and have avoided the calamity that so many were calling for anyway. It was the most hot-headed and unthinking of all of those men in those days that decided instead to take the course which they took.

As the first shells arced through the air towards the fort sitting in Charleston Harbor, nobody knew what the next day, weeks, months or years would hold. No one understood the changes that this action would bring about. No one had the vision to see that the old structure of the republic was being blasted away like the bricks and mortar of the fort.

In many way, the actions of Maine and Colorado are the moral equivalent of opening fire on Ft Sumter…