Thomas Paine Day?
State Rep. Lindsley Smith still wants to honor Thomas Paine with a day named for him.
During the 2007 legislative session, Smith, D-Fayetteville, filed a bill that would have designated Jan. 29, Paine’s birthday, as Thomas Paine Day in Arkansas. The House voted down the measure, but Smith said today she will file a similar bill for the 2009 session.
“Thomas Paine will be back,” she said. “I do have a much better feeling on that. I’ve had people come up and say, ‘Hey, I’m going to vote for that next time.’”
Paine wrote the pamphlet “Common Sense,” which argued for American independence from Britain and was published months before the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776.
Smith’s 2007 bill fell five votes short of the 51 votes needed to pass in the House. The vote came after Rep. Sid Rosenbaum, R-Little Rock, said Paine was a deist who criticized Christian beliefs in his book “The Age of Reason.”
Tags: Lindlsey Smith, Sid Rosenbaum, Thomas Paine
This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 30th, 2008 at 5:02 pm and is filed under General, State. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
January 1st, 2009 at 10:13 am
I’m a fifth-grade teacher in Colorado, and an intrical part of teaching civics is providing students with our primary sources: the founding documents. This is critical in understanding what “We the People” really means. Today, as they did over 230 years ago, those documents instill in students the belief that all our voices are important. Everyone of our citizens are given the right to pursue liberty. Futures do not have to be inevitable and “Little voices” can make dramatic impacts on events. That is Thomas Paine’s greatest contribution to our country. His pamphlet, Common Sense, spoke to all the voices in the 13 colonies during a time of great fear and indecision. He gave a vast number of citizens a vision of what each could do, 176 days before the Declaration of Independence. A belief that power should radiate from the citizens. That message is still paramount to all our students today. For that pamphlet alone, Paine needs to be recognized as a intrical part of the American miracle.
Mark Wilensky,
author of “The Elementary Common Sense of Thomas Paine: An Interactive Adaptation for All Ages”
http://www.NewCommonSenseBook.com