January 20th: Seminar on the US Constitution

As you may have read in the Rappahannock News this week, Friends of Liberty will sponsor a seven-week seminar on the U.S. Constitution and its relevance today, starting January 20. We invite all of you to attend. This is part of our expanding effort to reach out to the community with our message of conservative principles and Constitutional government.

What follows is the article with all the details. Please be sure to RSVP to Jim Gannon if you wish to attend at 540-675-3657 or gannon54@comcast.net.  (We don't expect everyone to attend every week of the seven weekly sessions, so feel welcome if you can come for some but not all of the discussions.)




Does the U.S. Constitution still matter?




That was the title of the cover-story in Time Magazine last July 4, which suggested that the nation's founding document might just be an "obstacle" on the road to progress in 21st Century America.




The Constitution and its relevance today will be the focus of an upcoming seven-week discussion seminar to be conducted at the Rappahannock County Library starting Friday, January 20.

Led by a local journalist and local lawyer, the informal lunch-time discussion series is titled "Lunch with the Founding Fathers-Revitalizing the Constitution." The sessions are free and open to the public. Attendees are invited to bring a brown-bag lunch to the talks, which will be held every Friday from January 20 through March 2, starting at 12 noon. The sessions will run 60 to 90 minutes. 

The discussions will range in subject matter from the Constitutional Convention of 1789 to the current controversies over the meaning of the nation's supreme law, such as the challenge to the constitutionality of national health-care legislation which the U.S. Supreme Court will hear this spring. 

"The topic is as historical as America's roots and as current as the battle over Obamacare," said Jim Gannon of Flint Hill, a retired newspaper editor, who will be one of the two discussion moderators. Hurley Smith, who earned his law degree at Notre Dame Law School and worked as a corporate counsel at Ford Motor Co., will co-lead the sessions.

The discussions will cover the background to and development of the Constitution, its founding principles, the federal system of government that it designed, and important court-case determinations that interpreted its meaning in the modern world. The course will use as its text Matthew Spaulding's book, "We Still Hold These Truths," published by the Heritage Foundation. Paperback copies of the text will be available to the participants at $10 each. 




This seminar is sponsored by Friends of Liberty, a local citizen's group dedicated to liberty, limited government and Constitutional conservatism. Space is limited, so if you wish to attend, please contact Jim Gannon at 540-675-3657 or by e-mail to gannon54@comcast.net to reserve a place. 




P.S. Get a jump-start on the seminar: You can order the book We Still Hold These Truths by Matthew Spaulding, from amazon.com, or (better yet) directly through Heritage Foundation at a special discount price of $9.  Just go to www.westillholdthesetruths.org   to order. Our sessions will focus on specific chapters of this book.