Conservative medical students alarmed at Obamacare are organizing their own group, modeled after the Federalist Society, called the Benjamin Rush Society. Benjamin Rush was a doctor who signed the Declaration of Independence, and the Society hewed to the Tea-Party History method of assuming the Founding Fathers were proto-dittoheads. “The American Founders,” explains the Society’s homepage, “believed that governments that seek to transcend their proper role in securing natural rights — which instead seek to coin new rights or to consolidate and centralize power in the interest of promoting some perceived greater good — will inevitably compromise the very natural rights that just governments are established to secure.”
Except Benjamin Rush, like many of the Founders, didn’t believe anything like that. Rush once wrote:
Let our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public property. Let him be taught to love his family, but let him be taught at the same time that he must forsake and even forget them when the welfare of his country requires it.
They’re doctors, dammit, not historians!
It appears the Benjamin Rush Society needs to find a new, more ideologically appropriate doctor to name itself after. Doctor Laura? Doctor Strangelove? Doctor Doom?
