Original Intent

Susan Jacoby in Mother Jones says News: Revisionist rhetoric notwithstanding, the founders left God out of the Constitution-and it wasn't an oversight.

Every time I write an article mentioning the constitutional omission of God, I receive hundreds of identical emails calling me a liar (sometimes a godless liar), because the document is unmistakably dated "in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven." That the religious right should fall back on a once-common manner of dating important papers--as unrevealing of religious intent as the use of B.C. and A.D.--demonstrates just how seriously it takes the enterprise of controlling the past in order to control the future.

Speaking of oversights, the Constitution actually
concludes rather unconventionally, dated

the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven and of the Independence of the United States of America the Twelfth

and the religious connotations of B.C. and A.D. are controversial.