Defending conservative principles on Facebook

Just had an interesting exchange - in fact, I doubt if it's done yet - on Facebook.  A "friend" who is of the pretty darn hard left variety (Unitarian, feminist, climate change Kool Aid swallower, zealot for caricaturing the Tea Party as a bunch of inbred illiterates) thought it would be clever to taunt me with a "news item" about a Tennessee Tea Party activist named Hal Rounds and his group's efforts to get the state's history textbooks to place the Founding Fathers' vision and courage front and center, rather than the fact that some of them were slave owners.

In these situations, the first step  is to do some digging.  I Googled Hal Rounds.  I swear, I'm convinced that someone at Google manipulates the ranking for links in searches to put the lefty ones first.  I had to scroll to halfway through the second page to find one non-lefty link about him.  It was from black conservative Kira Davis, and it was just what I needed to fire a return salvo.

But the kind of sense Davis makes is buried among a plethora of accusatory, nuance-lacking diatribes.

Here is what the Tennessee Tea Party wants to see as the criterion for dealing with the fact that some Founders owned slaves:

“No portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens, including those who reached positions of leadership.”

No assertion that textbooks shouldn't mention the slavery issue.  Just that it shouldn't be so front-and-center as to obscure the main point about the Founders:

 Where is the demand for the Tea Party seeking to remove the teaching of slavery from textbooks?  It becomes obvious that the TP is leveling the charge that public schools are purposely playing down or omitting the Founding Father’s great contributions to American history.  Such great contributions include the importance of the principles of the Declaration of Independence.  Never in the history of mankind has a country founded its government on the premise that the right to life and liberty derive from our Creator and that these rights are unalienable.  Additionally, it has never been truly established that government’s primary function is to merely protect those rights as the Constitution is like no other founding document in the world.  Countries such as Rome, Sweden, France, Germany etc. have had several forms of government (i.e. monarchy, oligarchy, democracy, etc.) – not America though.  The United States, on the other hand, is the only nation in the world that has had a Constitutional Republic that has lasted for over 220 years.

The liberties and opportunities of the United States have attracted many immigrants to come here.  Even illegal aliens recognize that America is like no other country in the world as many risk their lives to come here for job opportunities.  I have never heard of an American floating on an inner tube while fighting off sharks of the ocean to escape America; but I have certainly heard of a Cuban doing such a thing to flee the socialist whelms of Fidel Castro in search of freedom.
Then there’s also the charge from the Tea Party affiliate that information is being purposely omitted; which adds negative light to some our great revolutionaries.  For example, modern textbooks hardly ever acknowledge the fact that some founders never owned slaves.  John Adams, Signer of the Declaration of Independence, immediately comes to mind as he stated, “My opinion about it has always been known…never in my life did I own a slave.” (Letter to George Churchman and Jacob Lindley on January 24, 1801)
Some simply changed their position and later denounced slavery.

Stay tuned.  I doubt if my "friend" will let this be the end of it.  If it gets juicier, I'll fill you in here.

UPDATE:  My "friend" wants to expand the argument to include the Texas textbook dust-up.  This time I had to wade through six and a half pages of Google search to find Rick Moran's American Thinker piece, the first really substantive refutation of claims such as, for instance, that Texas conservatives wanted to impart a stature equal to Lincoln's to Jefferson Davis.

Here's my latest comment in our thread:

Anyway, on to the Texas component. Lefty accounts of what went down try to make it sound as if the point was to establish some kind of moral equivalency between Lincoln and Jefferson Davis. What actually was implemented was the inclusion of Davis's inaugural address, so that students might have the opportunity to compare and contrast it to Lincoln's. Davis did, after all, se himself as president of a sovereign nation. I might have a criticism that this is not the highest priority element of the Civil War years for eighth graders to focus on, but it hardly rises to an advocacy of a view of black inferiority.