In 1847, the unrepentant 29^th American Congress voted to repeal a piece of legislation, enacted in 1812, that forbade “public procreation and all acts of a carnal nature” from “finding roost within the civic eye.” This repeal caused an outcry at the time, particularly in the then-fledgling Western states. One Oklahoma columnist expressed her outrage in a church circular: “Damnation shall rain like fire upon the heads of our deeply misguided congressmen.” This prophetic conjecture was wrong in its particulars, but correct in its general thrust. Four days after that circular went to press, Democratic Speaker of the House, John Wesley Davis of Indiana, was vaulted into a fiery fissure that split open the floor of the Capitol building. A careful observer can still make out traces of this hastily repaired crack, though the official tour guides are unambiguously cautioned to make no note of it.

If you Google Mr. Davis today, however, little of this truth emerges. Indeed, the official fiction states that John Wesley Davis went on to become the U. S. Diplomatic Commissioner to China in 1848 and President Franklin Pierce’s appointee to the governorship of the Oregon Territory in 1853. (The incensed Oregonians, however, ousted the morally ambiguous Mr. Davis in favor of the blandly puritanical George Law Curry, whose oversized beard history has, ironically enough, judged to be a textbook dodge from his repressed homosexuality.) According to all archived government records, John Wesley Davis died on August 22, 1859 and was buried in Carlisle, Indiana. This well crafted narrative is plausible in spite of its inaccuracy, though most historians now recognize it as an example of the anti-mystical revisionism the United States government has been known for since the election of the self-acknowledged rabidly atheistic President John Tyler, Jr. in 1841. President Tyler’s conviction that “God, no matter how satisfying an illusion, is a cankerous evil that threads itself into public discourse and that must be extinguished, even at the cost of religious liberty” was the guiding principle of his single term in office and resulted in the ongoing expurgation of miraculous phenomena—such as Congressman Davis’s sulfurous descent into hell—from the commonly accepted historical narrative until the repeal of the Empirical Truth Act under the fundamentalist Taft administration in 1911.

The 1847 repeal of the Public Decency Act of 1812 emerged within a pronounced climate of fear. President Tyler’s militantly secularist policies resulted in the forced migration of thousands of members of the Eastern states’ “cultist” population to a desert settlement in Utah, the dissolution of hundreds of thousands of church-sanctioned marriages, and the institution of a relativistic code of law that permitted, and in some cases encouraged, violent atrocity. Although Mr. Davis privately supported the Public Decency Act of 1812, feeling as he did that “copulative action ought not to be heralded as a public spectacle,” fear of falling foul of President Tyler and his socially liberal Washington machinery caused him to publicly recant all of his deeply held ideals. “Truly, I have always felt that the physical expression of man’s intimacy for his wife is treasure too dear to be confined greedily within the walls of one’s private home,” he stated in an 1842 speech to the Indiana House of Representatives in a classic example of political amnesia. Unfortunately for Davis, he paid for such self-betrayal in 1847 as his fellow Congressmen coolly watched him suffer the torture and indignity of his hellish demise.

Though Taft’s cavalier administration did much to undo the societal permissiveness that had been developing in the United States since the Tyler presidency, the underlying foundation of secular thought that President Tyler terrified the nation into adopting has since remained unshaken. Many social critics pointed to the presidency of George W. Bush as America’s attempt to return to its pre-Tyler tradition of Puritanism, only to find themselves unable to account for the subsequent popularity of Barack Hussein Obama, a strict Tylerist, whose scorn for social mores became apparent upon his appointment of known dope fiend Steven Chu to the post of Secretary of Energy in 2009. Mr. Chu’s recent memoir, Fettered, in which he describes the ups and downs of his marriage to Jean Fetter, a self-employed Times Square dominatrix, was described by The New York Times as “a veritable orgy of poor taste… that glories more in our 12^th Secretary of Energy’s affinity for obscure sexual delectations than in the contributions to renewable energy, laser cooling techniques, and magneto-optical atom trapping that won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997.” Mere days after the release of Mr. Chu’s Fettered on the popular web-store Amazon.com, the man was consumed by everlasting fire. His publicist, however, attributed his sudden disappearance to an emergency meeting of the Copenhagen Climate Council—an excuse that has been met with extreme skepticism by all mainstream media outlets.

Thus, the history of social liberalism in the United States has been hounded by a corresponding history of divine retribution. Though the official record of state-sanctioned history carefully sidesteps these nasty manifestations of God’s righteous fury, many organizations are fighting for greater openness; the New Geneva Group, for example, argues, “Without a firm and undistorted knowledge of the historical consequences of an irreligious libertine lifestyle, American citizens will be forced to make potentially damning choices without the proper contextualization.” Young blogger Michelle Malkin is still more explicit: “Fuck John Tyler and his legacy of godlessness.” Her anger is deeply felt by millions across the country, and a movement towards the reinstatement of traditional values has been evidenced by the rise of grassroots Tea Party movements across many sectors of American society. These decentralized community action groups seek to appease an angry divinity through a return to Biblical morality; it is their goal that not one more American will see his or her eternal soul incinerated due to complicity with the United States government’s secular agenda.

John Wesley Davis, long ago perished, lives on as a cautionary symbol for the Tea Party movement. “The man was a victim,” wrote Ms. Malkin in a recent Blogspot interview, “but only because he was a patsy. Rather than surrendering his soul to Washington, he should have held firm in his beliefs. Congressman Davis is a warning of the fate that awaits those of us who betray our ideals for political favor.” Thus, over a century and a half later, the tragedy of John Wesley Davis is inspiring those who fight for social change. Though the long-range effects of the Tea Party movement are uncertain, they are commonly accepted as the first step towards unshackling this country from its unfortunate tradition of ruthless promiscuity and liberality.

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Bio: Nicolas Sansone holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and is the author of the novels Shooting Angels and The Calamari Kleptocracy. His short fiction has appeared in a number of journals, including PANK, Pear Noir! Denver Syntax, Bartleby Snopes, Word Riot, The Los Angeles Review, and NANO Fiction, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He currently lives in Boston. More information, including a list of publications, is available on his website, http://nicksansone.yolasite.com.