Hamilton wasn’t born in the colonies - he was from Nevis - so couldn’t be president on that count, either.
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The Constitution allowed for that:
No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President
Hamilton was absolutely eligible for the Presidency and by every indication was ambitious enough to pursue it before the whole sex scandal thing destroyed those ambitions.
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You mean to tell me that the good Sisters of St. Joseph at St. Patrick’s Grade School were fibbing when they said Hamilton couldn’t be president because he wasn’t born in the US? Who’d a thunk! 
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Huh. So, they think pushing kids to get involved in musical theatre is going to encourage them to be straight? I forsee unseen consequences.
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Technically we had seven consecutive Presidents who weren’t born in the United States.
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Technically Boris Johnson could become POTUS.
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Not since 2016. Boy, we sure dodged a bullet that year.
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It might be interesting to read an alternate history where that happens. One man traveling from country to country, an absolute disaster for each but somehow always managing to bungle his way into power in the next one anyway.
I would be a lot less keen to have real people live through it, though.
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My, how times have changed.
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I remember my teachers back in elementary/jr. high making a big deal about how many if not most of the founding fathers weren’t actually Christian, but Deists, who believed in God as the Great Clockmaker, who made and wound up the Universe, but who didn’t interfere much if at all. Later on I learned a more nuanced take on their situation, but still find a fundie Christian church portraying the founding fathers as Jesus freaks almost hilariously outrageous.
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It is as outrageous as it is ahistorical. White Evangelists live in a carefully constructed alternate reality that bears little resemblance to objective reality. When they were staying completely within their bubble, it was mostly OK, but now they are engaging with the wider public to force their bubble upon us all, which is an affront to freedom that must be challenged at every turn. The want Gillead, now is their end-game.
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Torn between my disdain for anything Christian oriented and my free culture anti-copyright stance.
If a leftist group had done something similar with a conservative artwork, would you all be hoping they got sued into oblivion, or defending the right to remix, criticize, and parody?
But this isn’t a parody or a critique of Hamilton, it’s just an unauthorized production with added homophobia.
If liberals staged an unauthorized production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child but added a few lines about tolerating LGBTQ+ people it would still be a copyright violation.
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And honestly, I would support that on the same principle I’m inclined to defend this church group on. I have a rather ambivalent, nuanced, and occasionally contradictory opinion of copyright, but ultimately think that people have a right to create their own versions of things simply because creating and expanding on previously created things is just what we do. Making money from it, well, that’s a whole other conversation.
The only difference being that I would personally sympathize with the people inserting pro-LGBT stuff into a Harry Potter production, where I have little to no sympathy for the church group. That’s the problem with rights, is that everybody gets them. Even the bad people.
One of my favorite books by Cory Doctorow is Pirate Cinema, where people do JUST THIS to reclaim works and present remixed and remade culture. So I too am torn here.
And as for the Harry Potter reference, people ALREADY ARE rewriting it and publishing it online to do just that. And the game that the book invented has basically , in the real world equivalent, taken itself away and out of JK Rowling’s hands.
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Lin Manuel-Miranda spent years of his life writing, developing and producing that musical. Taking the product all that work without his permission only to turn it into a platform for bigotry is a dick move.
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Also, I assume they didn’t run it as “Hamilton by Lin Manuel-Miranda with some of our bigotry slipped in”, so it’s unfairly misrepresenting him as responsible for it.
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Absolutely agree. And these church folks are absolute dicks. Don’t want any inference that I might feel differently.
If someone did the same with my work, I’d be royally pissed. I’d still defend their right to do it, but I sure as hell wouldn’t be happy about it. It seems like a reasonable price to pay for trans-centric Harry Potter fanfic and quidditch Quadball leagues.
Now, that, I do consider to be an extremely good counterargument. I don’t have a great answer, other than the hope that people would give and take credit appropriately.
Again, this is where my somewhat complicated ideas on copyright vs creator right start to get messy. And I think there’s a distinction between “shouldn’t do something” and “shouldn’t be allowed to do something” which crosses a line I’m not comfortable with.
Honestly, there’s just a lot to unpack here- The homophobic assholes being assholes is kind of its own obvious thing, but the copyright issue touches on a lot of stuff about creators’ rights, fair use, satire and commentary, pop culture being part of the commons, and capitalism in all that entails- Some of which I’m on board with, and some of which I’m not.
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To add to this, Hamilton in its own right has a lot of problematic issues with it, and there are people who are remixing it to attend to those problematic issues. (Such as how LMM seems to give Hamilton and others far too much a break on slavery, womens issues, and a whole host of other issues that seem to repeatedly crop up in LMM’s works.)
So it’s not JUST churches and bigots that are taking part in this, it’s… well… everyone.
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