Jack Hibbs, a Christian nationalist pastor who fancies himself quite the Constitutional scholar, delivered a falsehood-riddled history lesson about the origins of the Three-Fifths clause to his fib-loving flock on Thursday.
"You know the argument about, 'Well, they only believed that a Black man was three-fifths of a human,'" said Hibbs with the kind of smug confidence you find among people on the left side of the Dunning-Kruger curve. "You need to read why they got that. They agreed to that because the boneheads down south, they didn't want a Black individual to count at all! So the northern states, the northern colonies said, 'OK, will you at least give us this?' 'All right. We're not happy about it [but] we'll give you three-fifths.' Think about that. You got to start somewhere."
But as Kyle Mantyla explains over at Right Wing Watch, "That is literally exactly the opposite of what happened."
During the debate over how to allocate congressional representation during the Constitutional Convention, it was the southern delegates who wanted slaves to be counted when it came to apportionment and northern delegates who objected, insisting that slaves should not be counted at all.
After all, argued northern delegates, since slaves were considered property in the south and had no representation in southern legislatures, why should they be counted when apportioning representation in the federal government?
Pastor Hibbs should go on the lecture circuit with Minister Mike Keller, who said enslaved people should be admired for not going to Washington, D.C. to protest.
