It is absolutely absurd and I realize that my comment could be seen as endorsing this thinking. I only point it out because such arguments underpinned many of Scalia’s legal opinions and he was a big proponent of this reasoning, not only in the public sphere but in law.

Of course it was all nonsense that was never consistently applied, as this example demonstrates. The real reasoning is that some people like Scalia want to reinforce the dominance of people at the top of various social hierarchies and remove protections for people at the bottom. Since the founders were all wealthy, white landowners, their views are fairly compatible with this ideology, making it a useful fiction for people with such goals. And for the rest of us, it gives us some vague fuzzy feeling to believe our great ancestors will be smiling down on us or something.