Independence Day is a time to reflect — and for the Right wing to shriek about the vision of the “Founders.”

Here’s something to reflect about: nothing important in the American identity became final in 1791. What America is all about changed radically in the 1860′s, and again in the 1920′s and 30′s, and yet again in the last third of the Twentieth Century. It’s on the cusp again, as we transition from a white Christian country to one based on diversity, inclusion, and compulsory — that is the word — tolerance.

The Eighteenth Century vision of a severely limited government which left (male) slaveholders, merchants, and, maybe, yeoman farmers free to run their own lives — and those of their wives, children, servants, and other inferiors — as they saw fit is no more binding on us than the wearing of knee-breeches. Too many people have died to rid us of that vision — in the Civil War, the union upsurge, the Civil Rights Movement, and countless other, less dramatic confrontations.

We owe the F’ing Fathers and their present-day partisans nothing. Even if we admire some of their qualities — and we probably should — we should feel no obligation to run our own lives according to their rules. Like everyone else in history (ourselves included) they had their blind spots, and they knew next to nothing about the kind of society we live in.

America belongs to us now. And it means what we say it does.

Happy Fourth.