Letter: Puglia’s quotation may be erroneous

Dr. Joe Puglia’s Aug. 6 column offered the following quote: “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what to have for dinner. Liberty is a well armed lamb.” The most succinct analysis comes from Wikipedia: “Widely attributed to [Benjamin] Franklin on the Internet, sometimes without the second sentence. It is not found in any of his known writings ... The phrasing itself has a very modern tone …” The quote is most frequently seen with “lunch” instead of “dinner” (Wikipedia notes that the word lunch does not appear anywhere until after 1820) and the second sentence is usually quoted “Liberty is a well armed lamb contesting the vote,” which is worryingly anarchistic and contrary to the purity of Franklin’s and the Founding Fathers’ beloved belief in Democracy. Smart Franklin would never have been trapped in that simplistic wolf-sheep-vote-gun analogy.

We all understand what Dr. Joe wants to say, but part of believing in Originalism, the Founding Fathers and their original Constitutional words and intents is to do the work (be aware that made-up quotes infect the Internet), to report publicly with integrity what they actually provably said, else you are engaged in the same interpretive “activism” so seriously criticized by many.

Douglas Baldwin

La Cañada Flintridge