On his nationally syndicated radio talk show, host Mark Levin corrected Secretary of State John Kerry for stating that the Constitution we are living by here in the U.S. “first wrote slavery into the Constitution before it wrote slavery out.”

“You know,” said Mark Levin, “the Constitution does not write slavery into it, or it wasn’t written out.”

Levin’s comments reference U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s speech in Brussels, where Secretary of State Kerry spoke on the importance of transatlantic relations during an event hosted by the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the United States Mission to the European Union on October 4, 2016.

Below is a transcript of Levin’s comments on Secretary of State John Kerry’s remarks on the U.S. Constitution and slavery in Brussels:

Levin: “He went overseas, and in Brussels, today, he trashed America. Here’s what he said.

“Cut four, go.”

Kerry: “We have this fight in America too. We have fifty states. We’re still developing, somewhat, the relationship between states and federal government. The Supreme Court frequently comes out with a decision realigning it or adjusting it, one way or the other. It’s a living institution.

“The Constitution that we are living by, you know, first wrote slavery into the Constitution before it wrote slavery out.”

Levin: “You know, the Constitution does not write slavery into it, or it wasn’t written out.

“You know, if you read the dissenting opinion in the Dread Scott case, just read the dissenting opinion in the Dred Scott case. It is beautifully written.

“And the dissenting opinion in the Dred Scott case – the Dred Scott case in which Chief Justice Taney, writing for a majority of the Court, essentially upheld slavery – you should read Justice Curtis’s dissent because obviously, when big dummy John F. Kerry went to law school, he didn’t read it. He didn’t read it.

“There is a three fifths clause in the Constitution, and for the thousandth time I want to explain it, that slaves, blacks, three fifths of a person, three fifths of a person.

“What actually happened, you see, ladies and gentlemen, at the Constitutional Convention is that the slave states argued that for purposes of apportioning seats in the House of Representatives they wanted blacks, and in some cases slaves, to be counted so that they would have more representation in the House of Representatives.

“The northerners, many of them, said, “No. No, you can’t treat blacks as slaves and then as people for purposes of muscling up your representation in the House of Representatives.” So they had a compromise.

“The compromise the north forced wasn’t that blacks were three fifths of human beings. It was a mathematical compromise because the north wanted to weaken the representation of the south for this explicit purpose.

“In fact, Curtis points out in his dissent, and Lincoln would repeat it during the Lincoln-Douglas debates, that in several states – five out of the 13 colonies – blacks voted.

“Now, I make no excuses for this. We understand the history of slavery and so forth. It’s a blemish on every society that has entertained it at any time in their history, and virtually every society has.

“In the Middle East it’s still going on. In Africa, it’s still going on. In Asia, it’s still going on. You have a slave trade in the industrialized West, including in the United States of America. Various tribes in Africa, had slaves. Various peoples in Central and South America had slaves. In Africa, Muslims still enslave Christians, and I could go on and on.

“It’s ugly. It’s horrific, and virtually every society’s been touched by it.

“But the other thing that they did in the Constitution was not to enshrine slavery, but because the British among others kept – the British that didn’t have slavery at that time – kept exporting slaves into the United States, which was a very big landmass, no control over its borders, pretty much. There were states and individuals in this country who were importing them, and the slave trade was cut off with a date certain in the Constitution.

“And the truth is, if there had not been a Union, if there had not been an America, if there had not been a United States of America, obviously there never would have been a civil war and God knows how long slavery would have gone on for.

“But the Constitution does not promote slavery, and the word ‘slave’ or ‘slavery’ cannot be found in the Constitution. And if you understand as I do, as Lincoln did, as the Framers did that the Constitution is the governing document, the manifestation, the political manifestation of the Declaration of Independence, then slavery could never exist forever in the United States. That’s what Lincoln said, in a Lewistown, Illinois speech in 1858.”