“I am increasingly persuaded that the earth belongs exclusively to the living, and that one generation has no more right to bind another to its laws and judgments than one independent nation has the right to command another.” Thomas Jefferson

I just had the pleasure of watching the Tom Hanks-produced DVD of “John Adams,” a 2007 HBO miniseries (based on David McCullough’s outstanding biography) that is both great drama and an honest effort to depict many of our nation’s Founders in their warts-and-all splendor.

The eponymous protagonist, an early outspoken Son of Liberty and America’s second president, John Adams is presented as brilliant, principled, stubborn, prickly-tempered, loyal, easily offended, altogether human, and worthy of a place in our national pantheon. Sadly, post-colonial American History and the stories of the early years of our Republic aren’t in vogue at present.

(That might change if Hollywood were to conjure up a cinematic take of George Washington crossing the Delaware to destroy a lair of Hessian vampires, or another one of hitherto though-of scoundrel—and U.S. Vice President—Aaron Burr killing in a duel not Alexander Hamilton, but his freshly-raised-from-the-dead zombie.)

Among the most interesting of the Founders is, of course, Thomas Jefferson, the man who succeeded Adams as president and who was both his close friend and bitter political rival. The correspondence between the two men in their declining years is great literature, great prose, and great drama—to say nothing of great psychology—that exposes the contradictions in personality and character of two of our country’s most revered men.

Jefferson is rightly revered as the Father of the Declaration of Independence, which was novel for its time in its insistence that “all men are created equal,” and just as rightly condemned for the hypocrisy he displayed in owning slaves right up to the time of his death.

(Considering himself a true revolutionary, Jefferson also displayed what could be interpreted as a disturbing indifference to violence, demonstrated in his almost-innocent observation that, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”)

In 1789, Jefferson wrote a letter to his fellow Virginian James Madison, the man who would succeed him as President exactly 20 years later. In it, he addresses “the question [of] whether one generation of men has a right to bind another” through the mandate of laws and other binding instruments (such as the U.S. Constitution, which Madison was instrumental in creating).

Invoking a much-recalled phrase from his 1776 Declaration, Jefferson called it “self-evident” “that the earth belongs in [legal right of enjoyment] to the living; that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.”

In this letter and in others, Jefferson is contemptuous of a living generation imposing its own values over the members of a generation that is yet to be born. He expressed this hesitancy during debate over the new nation’s Constitution (which he did not take part in writing), arguing the immorality of one generation inheriting a previous one’s debts and being constrained by its outdated morality and norms.

It is for this and many other reasons that I am always amused at Jefferson’s political “malleability,” even nearly two centuries after his death, and at those who use his writings to support their own political arguments, whether they come from the left or the right. The brilliant and revolutionary Jefferson—who was very much a man of his time, contradictions and all—had an appreciation for the fundamental requirement of man to be free (or to seek a freedom that he is denied), and wasn’t above soaking the ground with a little hemoglobin to see that freedom take root.

In light of this, I can only wonder what Jefferson would say to the traditionalists (some would call them “reactionaries”) who hide behind the “classical” definition of marriage as an excuse to deny their countrymen the full measure of their rights under law. Methinks that TJ would agree the earth—and all its blessings—belongs to the living.