“A Republican senator is demanding the National Archives stop putting warning labels on the United States’ founding documents. Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., sent a letter to National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) archivist David Ferriero outlining his concern about the ‘blanket application’ of a ‘Harmful Language Alert’ on the nation’s pillar documents” Fox News reports.
“‘Most disturbing is use of the alert for our nation’s founding documents, including the Constitution, Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights,’ Lankford wrote in the letter exclusively obtained by Fox News. ‘It should be removed immediately.’ Lankford pointed out that NARA’s warning posted on the Constitution and other founding documents says ‘some of the materials presented here may reflect outdated, biased, offensive and possibly violent views and opinions’ before tearing into the agency. ‘This obviously politically-charged qualifier goes leaps and bounds beyond the role of NARA, which has been established to operate as a nonpartisan entity responsible for providing public access to federal government records,’ Lankford wrote.”
OurDocuments.gov is also non-responsive (meaning it looks tiny on a smartphone screen) and has a “Get Flash Player” link in the top of the homepage, so if anything the “warning label” is about the least of its problems. Nevertheless these gentle disclaimers on a site housing the text of documents in which the word “colored” appears approximately 91 times, “negro” 5 times, and “lynch” once, among others, does seem a perfect cause for a Conservative senator facing a primary challenge on his right from some batshit insane QAnon-loving MAGAchurch pastor to bitch about that’ll almost certainly go nowhere and be forgotten about in few weeks, if not days.