Wrong and Dangerous: Ten Right Wing Myths about Our Constitution

by Garrett Epps

The primary purpose of the United States Constitution is to limit Congress. There is no separation of church and state. The Second Amendment allows citizens to threaten the government. These are just a few of the myths about our constitution peddled by the Far Right—a toxic coalition of Fox News talking heads, radio hosts, angry “patriot” groups, and power-hungry Tea Party politicians. Well-funded, loud, and unscrupulous, they are trying to do to America’s founding document what they have done to global warming and evolution—wipe out the facts and substitute partisan myth. In the process, they seek to cripple the right of We the People to govern ourselves. In Wrong and Dangerous, legal scholar Garrett Epps provides the tools needed to fight back against the flood of constitutional nonsense. In terms every citizen can understand, he tackles ten of the most prevalent myths, providing a clear grasp of the Constitution and the government it established.

217 pages, Hardcover

Published September 16, 2012

About the author

Garrett Epps (born in 1950 in Richmond, Virginia) is an American legal scholar, novelist, and journalist. He is Professor of Law at the University of Baltimore; previously he was the Orlando J. and Marian H. Hollis Professor of Law at the University of Oregon.

Epps attended St. Christopher's School and Harvard College, where he was the President of The Harvard Crimson. He later received an M.A. in Creative Writing from Hollins University, and a law degree from Duke University, where he was first in his class. After graduation from Harvard, he was a co-founder of The Richmond Mercury, a short-lived alternative weekly whose alumni include Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Frank Rich and Glenn Frankel. He also worked as an editor or reporter for The Richmond Afro-American, The Virginia Churchman, The Free-Lance Star, and The Washington Post. From 1983 until 1988, he was a columnist for Independent Weekly (then a bi-weekly). Immediately before coming to the University of Oregon, he spent a year clerking for the Honorable John D. Butzner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

Epps has written two novels, including The Shad Treatment, which won the Lillian Smith Book Award, as well as the nonfiction books To An Unknown God: Religious Freedom on Trial, which was published in 2001 and was a finalist for the ABA's Silver Gavel Award, and Democracy Reborn: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Civil Rights in Post-Civil War America, which was published in 2006 and is the first comprehensive history of the framing of the Fourteenth Amendment. Democracy Reborn won the 2007 Oregon Book Award for non-fiction, and also was a finalist for the ABA Silver Gavel Award. He has also written numerous articles and editorials in newspapers including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic.