A reader writes:

Ron Paul's religious AND constitutional fundamentalisms are anti-historical, and consequently anti-literate, as all forms of fundamentalism are.  As a Christian fundamentalist believes in the supposed "literal" truth and total organic unity of the bible from beginning to end (the "authored by God" position), failing to acknowledge the thousand of years of changing circumstances and beliefs that produced the various texts that we now call scripture, the constitutional fundamentalist views the U.S. Constitution as a document produced by a group of like-minded individuals with one definitive goal in mind.

For Paul and others, "the forefathers" are our surrogate God/author; the strangest thing about this point of view is that it directly contradicts their mantra that our country was founded by "rugged individualists."  How can our forefathers be both a group of individualists AND a collective hive-mind?  The God/author view of the constitution ignores all readily and widely available documentation of the circumstances which produced the Constitution, which shows us a group of men with a wide variety of opinions on how to deal with the important issues of their time and create a fair representative government of the people.  The Constitution is a series of compromises that this group of individuals settled on, not the "word of God."