The Legacy of the Declaration of Independence

This Sunday, July 4th, we will once again celebrate our nation’s founding, marking the day in 1776 that the Continental Congress formally adopted the Declaration of Independence.


The Declaration of Independence was intended to be an official statement explaining why the 13 American colonies had declared their independence from Great Britain. In the years following its passage, however, this statement of principles about the rights of man grew to mean much more.

America became the only country in history founded, as Leo Strauss explained, “in explicit opposition to Machiavellian principles,” by which he meant crass, power politics. Instead, America was founded on a set of clearly expressed “self-evident” truths. Thomas Jefferson said the Declaration was “intended to be an expression of the American mind,” and indeed, no document since has so succinctly and so eloquently spelled out the spirit of America.

Our country has evolved out of the timeless truths expressed in the Declaration of Independence to develop a distinct character and set of values that distinguishes us from even other Western democracies.

This holiday, it is worth taking a look at how several key phrases from the Declaration of Independence have served as definitional statements about the aspirations of America, and how those words of our Founding Fathers’ have affected America in the 234 years since they were written.

“…all men are created equal”
The Founding Fathers who authored the Declaration were the first people in the history of the world ever to express our natural equality as a principle of government in such an unqualified way. Though neither the Constitution that followed nor the Founders personally quite fulfilled the promise of those words, it has since been the project of our country to accomplish them.
America came though to recognize that we are not all literally equal—we are born with different capabilities and attributes, and to different stations in life—the words of the founders capture the truth that we must treat each other as equals. We are “created equal” in the sense that all men (and, we now recognize, all women) have the same natural rights, granted to them by God. We are all the same under the law.
This powerful statement of universal rights was used by abolitionists as a moral cudgel to rid the United States of slavery, an institution explicitly at odds with the truths expressed in the Declaration of Independence. Abraham Lincoln consistently evoked the phrase in his famous Peoria speech against the Kansas-Nebraska Act and later during the Lincoln-Douglas debates. As President, Lincoln again included the phrase in the Gettysburg Address as the moral underpinning by which the union should be rededicated. Later, during the women’s suffrage movement and civil rights struggles of the 1960s, leaders such as Martin Luther King used the powerful phrase as a reminder to America that separate (treating people differently under the law based on their race) was not equal.

Leaders such as Lincoln and King believed that as America’s founding political document, the Declaration of Independence is our moral guide with which to interpret the Constitution. They saw that we cannot divorce the law from the moral underpinnings that legitimize it.

But by what authority does that moral underpinning exist?

“…endowed by their Creator”

The core contention of the Declaration of Independence and the principle of natural rights upon which America was founded is that there is a higher moral order upon which the laws of man must be based. The Declaration asserts the existence of “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God,” which had a clear meaning in 18th Century England and America. It referred to the will of God as displayed by the natural order of the world.

John Locke, who was widely read by the leaders of colonial America, wrote in his Second Treatise on Government: “Thus the law of nature stands as an eternal rule of all men, legislators as well as others. The rules that they make for other men’s actions, must ... be conformable to the law of nature, i.e., to the will of God.”

William Blackstone, who was arguably the single greatest influence on the creation of the American legal system, wrote in Commentaries on the Laws of England, “As man depends absolutely upon his Maker for everything, it is necessary that he should at all points conform to his maker’s will.”

America’s founding was heavily influenced by the English and Scottish enlightenment, which specifically included a space for God and religion in its conceptions of rights, freedom and human reason. This gave the American Revolution a distinctly different character than the French Revolution, which in its most radical phase sought freedom by casting off all authority and remnants of the existing order -- especially God.

In the American formulation as declared by our founders, man’s rights come from God, not from man’s ability to “reason” them into existence. Man does not depend on government to grant him rights through a bureaucratic process, but instead to secure those rights that have been granted to him by God.

In other words, power comes from God, to you, which is then loaned to government.

Thus, the Declaration states, “That to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
The English and Scottish enlightenment’s conscious inclusion of a space for God and religion had another key influence on the American system of government. Whereas the French Revolution believed it could create a “new man” through government education and indoctrination, the American Founding Fathers had a profound sense of the fallen nature of man. Thus, they created a system of checks and balances that would serve as a restraint on those in power.

“…the pursuit of happiness”

Here again we see the influence of the English and Scottish enlightenment on the Founding Fathers. For writers such as John Locke and Francis Hutcheson, the term “happiness” meant something close to “wisdom and virtue.” It did not mean hedonism or other shallow pleasures as the term is too often confused to mean today.

It is also essential to note that the Declaration does not say that we have a right to have happiness provided to us. It says we have the right to pursue happiness – an active verb. As I point out in jest to audiences in my speeches, the Declaration says nothing about a right to redistribution of happiness. It says nothing about happiness stamps. It does not say some people can be too happy and that government should make them less happy out of a sense of fairness.
The Founding Fathers understood that government could not give people happiness, that it was instead up to government to create an environment where the people could best work to achieve their dreams. As AEI’s Arthur Brooks has pointed out, polls of wealthy and successful people show that the harder one works for that success, the greater happiness one derives from it.

America is a land where through hard work, determination, and entrepreneurialism, people can achieve their big dreams. The right of “the pursuit of happiness” spelled out in the Declaration is a definitional statement about the nature of America that has attracted people from all over the world to come here to pursue those dreams.

Who We Are This July 4th

A bedrock belief of American conservatism is a respect for the established traditions and values of American culture. Conservatives believe from the time the first colonists landed in Jamestown, America took on a unique culture and set of values that have set us apart from our European cousins: a belief in natural rights, strong religious faith and values, the importance of the work ethic, and a spirit of community that manifests itself in a belief in limited government and strong civic participation. It is this set of beliefs – truths enshrined in the Declaration of Independence – that have made America so successful, and they deserve to be protected.

The modern Left – what I describe in my book To Save America as a “secular-socialist machine” – is using every lever of power at its disposal to dismantle our unique American civilization and replace it with a secular, bureaucratic culture in which government is big, citizens are small, and our rights are defined by the state rather than endowed by our Creator. Equality under the law is being discarded in favor of equality of results; consent of the governed is being subverted by an increasingly overbearing federal bureaucracy and imperial judiciary; and the pursuit of happiness is being undermined by a redistributive welfare state that kills the can-do, entrepreneurial spirit of America.
This July 4th, I hope you will take time to read the Declaration of Independence and consider the truths about our rights and freedoms contained within. I hope you will take time to appreciate the sacrifices made by the founding generation and generations since to secure our liberty.
But most of all, I hope you will take time to appreciate the greatness of America and how hard we must be willing to work to preserve that which makes it so special.
Happy Independence Day.
 
WRITTEN BY: Newt Gingrich and original article available by clicking on the title of this blog entry

Man on the Moon

Today is the 40th anniversary of what remains the greatest single technological feat that mankind has ever achieved. It was forty years ago today that American astronaut Neil Armstrong took that first step on to the surface of the moon, and uttered the iconic words: "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind!"

Armstrong had become the first human being to ever set foot on another world outside of the earth.

On July 20th, 1969, the crew of Apollo 11 orbited the moon, after having left behind their home planet Earth just four days earlier. They were on the verge of the most spectacular achievement in man's history. Since our creation, man has looked up at the glowing disc in the night sky and dreamed. At first those dreams involved the nature and the meaning of the object. Then the moon became an object of study, particularly as to it's relationship to Earth. Finally, it had become a destination.

Now, here were three Americans: Neil Armstrong, Ed 'Buzz' Aldrin, and Michael Collins, actually flying above that moon and preparing to land on it. Collins would draw the role of staying behind in order to pilot the command module 'Columbia', while Armstrong and Aldrin would actually descend in the 'Eagle' landing module to the moon's surface. They had the full resources of NASA, the National Aeronauticas and Space Administration, behind them, but they were very much on their own in so many ways.

The process to reach that point had been ongoing for decades. It began with the creation of rockets, and moved onward as those rockets were made larger and more powerful, capable of traveling further and further. Finally, man developed the technologies and the courage to enter outer space, that vast area outside of the protective atmosphere of the only planet we had ever known intimately.

President John F. Kennedy, slain by an assassin's bullet almost six years earlier, had set the ball in motion when on May 25th, 1961 he uttered the great challenge: "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth." Six months later, I was born. Two and a half years later, Kennedy would lie dead. But his vision and goal of landing on the moon would become the passion of thousands.

I remember well the excitement leading up to the moon landing. I was just 7 years old in that summer of 1969, and far too young to understand most of the incredible changes that were happening to our country in those days. The inner city race riots as the Civil Rights movement marched forward, the murders of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the Vietnam War. These things meant nothing to me at that age. But the moon landing, this was huge to the imagination of a young boy.

My parents allowed my brother Mike, who had just turned 6, and myself to stay awake past our usual bed times on that Sunday night to watch this historic event. I recall sitting mesmerized at the entire proceeding as it unfolded on the black and white television picture in our living room on American Street in South Philadelphia. There was a lot of language that was over my head, but I was getting the idea.

At a few minutes before 11:00pm our time, Armstrong took that final step down the ladder from the Eagle and spoke those words. And I joined over 600 million people around the world in viewing grainy black and white pictures of the exact moment that a man stepped on to another world, out on to that glowing night disc that we still look up at each night. We had fulfilled President Kennedy's great goal with a little more than five months to spare.

I remember following as much of the mission as I possibly could in the following weeks on both television and in the newspapers, culminating in the dramatic return home of the astronauts that was capped by their capsule splashing down into the Pacific Ocean on July 24th.

Over the next few years, following subsequent Apollo moon missions was something that I always anticipated with excitement and thoroughly enjoyed. There were five more after Apollo 11, all of which took groups of men to the moon and back, over the next three years. On December 14th, 1972, the Commander of Apollo 17, Eugene Cernan, lifted his foot off the surface of the moon. No human being has stepped foot on any celestial object in the ensuing 37 years.

I still to this day remember the excitement, the thrill, the wonder of those days in the summer of 1969, as I stood outside and looked up at the moon as billions of men, women and children had for mellenia before me done, and was able for the first time to know that other men were up there walking around, working, talking, living.

I hope that sometime before my time on the Earth is up, that I again get to see men travel to another world. There are already missions being planned for man to return to the moon in the next decade, and then in the early planning stages for a possible trip to the planet Mars within 2-3 decades. Those would be missions of wonder for my children and grandchildren to share.

May God bless mankind with the courage, the wisdom, the vision, the ability, the resources, the technology, and the determination to continue to reach out beyond our world, and to explore the vast greatness and the majestic wonders that He has created. As a wonderful, old television show of those Apollo days said: "To boldly go where no man has gone before!"

The Canonization of George Tiller

Late-term abortionist George Tiller has been buried. His clinic has been permanently closed. It is being reported that candlelight vigils were held across America for him and that another late-term abortionist has compared him to the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. “Pro-choice” Christian ministers called him a “martyr in the classical sense.” One even called him a “saint.” That he was killed in a church certainly contributed to the hagiography.

Anyone who claims to value all human life should condemn his murder, but that does not mean we should refrain from telling the truth about this alleged saint.

Let’s assume he was not in it for the reported $6,000-$20,000 he charged per late-term abortion, or the fees he charged for the other abortions, 60,000 total, which left him a well-heeled man by all accounts.

Let’s stipulate that he believed in abortion on the level of religious commitment, that abortion was for him what one of his minister-supporters called it: a sacrament.

Let’s say he was a believer in abortion on the order of the Christian martyrs of the second century who were torn apart by wild beasts for their refusal to reject the Christian God. Let us stipulate to all of that. But for what cause, exactly, was he a martyr?

We are told he was a martyr for women. But not one of the late-term abortions he did was to save a woman’s life, according to Kansas health department records. Tiller was not in the life-saving business.

Was he a martyr for some postmodern notion of freedom? Those celebrating his life’s work are most comfortable with abstract terms like “choice,” but we understand that there is real flesh and blood behind the sloganeering – that they are celebrating the work of this man’s hands. Tiller’s late-term abortions were described to the Kansas state legislature:

Tiller or his staff would inject a drug called digoxin through the mother’s abdomen and into the heart of the living baby, killing the child. The mother then has a dead baby in her womb for up to four days as she waits to deliver. The mothers would wait in a local hotel. When the time came to expel her dead baby one Tiller patient, Michele Armesto-Berge, told Kansas lawmakers that Tiller’s staff made her sit over and give “birth” to her dead baby into a toilet.

This is what Tiller did to countless vulnerable women and to countless viable children, children who felt pain, children who could have lived outside the womb if given the chance. If George Tiller was a martyr, he was a martyr to this.

Indeed, Martin Luther King’s niece, Alveda King, said of the comparisons of Tiller to her uncle: “to mention the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., who worked through peaceful and nonviolent means, in the same breath with that of George Tiller, whose work ended peace and brought violence to babies in the womb, is offensive beyond belief.”

Until Sunday morning, public opinion about abortion was moving towards pro-life positions. Three recent polls confirmed that Americans’ views on abortion had shifted dramatically. One poll showed that 51 percent of Americans – an absolute majority – call themselves pro-life, and that the pro-choice designation trails by nine percentage points. Another poll showed that, even in the highly important 18-to-29-year-old demographic, pro-lifers outnumber supporters of choice. And when you drill down into the polling data, you discover that most Americans are against most of the abortions that occur each year and believe they should be made illegal.

This change has come about through advances in science and medicine that allow new mothers actually to see their developing infants. It also happened because pro-lifers have been wise and patient, and have done their work in large part quietly, head to head and heart to heart. The pro-life movement has been successful against all odds in not only keeping the issue alive despite massive opposition in the media and popular culture, but also in changing hearts and minds.

Will the murder of George Tiller halt this steady and solid progress? It’s too soon to tell. But we should brace for the possibility that a violent act committed by a mentally disturbed man (as his family describes him) will change the playing field profoundly on the most important human rights issue of our day. Abortion activists are already trying to use this crime to discredit and to thwart our efforts. Will the Obama Administration exploit this – another crisis – to try to silence our voices and further its pro-abortion agenda cloaked in “common ground” rhetoric?

Those of us in the pro-life movement know this: We are not going anywhere. We will continue to be peaceful and persistent. Even now, young people on college campuses are coming up with creative ways to advance our cause. Even now, elderly men and women are standing outside of abortion clinics praying for young women to turn around. Even now, young women are turning around, and their lives and the lives of their babies are being saved. Our work will go on.

WRITTEN by Cathy & Austin Ruse at The Catholic Thing webiste on June 12th, 2009

An American Mandate for Change

"Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future. - John F. Kennedy"
The American people went to their respective polling places yesterday and voted, and when they were done the election result was not even close. In a truly historic victory, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois was elected to the Presidency. He was elected by a 53%-47% margin over his Republican challenger John McCain, a far greater margin than this writer believed was likely or even possible. In doing so he becomes the first African-American ever elected to the highest office in the land. That may not be too significant for the younger generation raised in a largely racially integrated society. But to those of us who were alive in the 1960's and '70's, the election of a black man to the Presidency is truly remarkable. Forty years after Martin Luther King was assasinated in Memphis, Tennessee, his dream has taken its largest step forward into becoming reality. Could even the great Dr. King have had the foresight to see this happening in America this quickly, if ever at all? In electing him, the American people have shown unequivocally that we have fully matured beyond the racial prejudices and barriers that previously separated us. In a time of Islamofascist terrorism, the American people overcame fears and elected to the Presidency a man with a Muslim-sounding name and at least a familial Islamic past. In a time where Americans are believed to be divided racially, the American people overcame those perceptions and elected to the Presidency a man whose mother was white, and whose father was a black man who abandoned them. The key factor in the Obama victory was the simple but effective theme of his campaign: Change. After 6 years of war, no matter how necessary, Americans were tired of it. They have grown tired of talk about terrorists, Osama bin Laden, Islamofascism, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran. They have grown weary of a Bush administration that, though keeping America safe since 9/11, has done little to address any substantive issues beyond security here at home. Liberals wanted Bush impeached, but did not have the power to put him through the type of trial to which Bill Clinton subjected himself. In my opinion, last night's vote by the American people was all about Democrats and dissatisfied centrists ceremonially tossing George W. Bush out of the White House. Unfortunately for John McCain, an obviously good and decent man and a true American hero, he was standing in the shoes that Bush was unable by our laws to stand in himself. It likely would not have mattered in the end who was the Republican nominee for President or Vice-President. This race was certainly not decided by a dissatisfaction with a potential President McCain, or even any real problems with a VP Sarah Palin. This race was a referendum on the Bush administration, highlighted by the Obama campaign's primary message in the closing weeks that a McCain victory would signal a '3rd Bush term' and a continuation of its ideals. Hillary Clinton must really be kicking herself this morning. For years she was seen as the next great Democratic hope. She was not only the clear front-runner just a year ago, but she was the only real candidate in the race on the Dem side. Had Barack Obama never emerged, she would be celebrating her own history-making election today as the first female U.S. President. That is how much the people of America wanted a change. In the end, Republicans across the nation were fighting a battle that they had almost no chance of winning. Yesterday, Barack Obama swept to the Presidency thanks to a mandate for the very change that his campaign brilliantly called for, and he brought along a boat load of U.S. Senators and Congresspersons in his considerable wake. America will be a fundamentally different nation over the next few years. Whether that change is for the better or not is yet to be determined. I personally do not hold out the same hope that Obama's followers feel this morning. But one thing is certain, America will change, because it has been mandated by a clear majority of the people. Congratulations to President-elect Barack Obama, to Vice-President-elect Joe Biden, their families and campaign staff, and all those who voted for them. When possible and as best we can, we Republicans will support you as our President. We will also oppose you vocally on issues that we feel are key to our nation and our American culture. And as we all move forward from today, may God bless America as He always has in the past.