Locke also held, and greatly profited from, extensive investments in the Royal Africa Company (slave traders) and, as secretary for the British proprietary colony of Carolina (most of modern-day TN, NC, SC, MS, AL and GA), drafted a constitution for that colony providing for, among other things, the establishment of a slave-labor plantation economy. Needless to say, this same acceptance of slavery, not to mention outright owning slaves in many cases, also characterized many of the 'Founding Fathers,' and the evidence remains in our Constitution to this day (the three-fifths clause). Was that too part of the plan "to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments" all this cut-and-paste quote potpourri supposedly points to--in which case our "progression" in amending the Constitution to outlaw it was presumably regrettable--or do we make exceptions for progress that, from our present vantage point, seems like the way it should always have been?
(Not that any of this has much of anything to do with Obama's statements--but then neither do any of the Founding Fathers' personal religious beliefs. But if you're going to insist that the Constitution was explicitly intended to preserve and facilitate a polity based on Christianity, then you'd better be able to reconcile the Constitution's preservation and facilitation of slavery with that claim...and explain why, if that kind of moral compromise is the result you get from "an instrument whereby already existing religious values of the nation could be protected and perpetuated," anyone should want to continue to use said "instrument" in that way, rather than being open to changes in values once seen as religiously justified.)
