Rights Older than Human Institutions and Spring from Eternal Justice, Without Any Exceptions Whatsoever: the Heart of the Declaration

Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson drafting the Declaration. Leon Jerome Ferris, public domain.

I wrote about Independence Day twice yesterday, and today I want to add a few words about how important the basic proposition of the Declaration; “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…” are indeed the foundation of the American experiment. It is my belief that we only allow them to be fine words spoken long ago and sealed magnificently for us to wander by and look at as then they mean nothing.

I know there are quite a few politicians, preachers, and pundits in this country who based on their actions view the Declaration and Constitution of the United States as mere paper to be quoted from on rare occasion but not to really be taken seriously. They speak words praising those principles on Independence Day, but spend the rest of the year working to deny the rights of others while expanding their own. They are always in the van when it comes to denying liberty to other Americans. Trump’s right hand man in all things dictatorial, Stephen Miller is leading the way backed by Russell Vaught’s Project 2025.

But this principle is, the principle in the preamble of the Declaration is the foundation of our American experiment, and that my friends is exactly what our country is and always has been. If our founders had wanted a monarchy or another form of authoritarian government they would have done that.

Instead they embarked on an experiment, an experiment in liberty and democracy that continues today. I was an experiment that they knew that they knew had never been tried before, and that many people thought it would die in its infancy. It was revolutionary with an eye to the future that was yet unknown and uncharted.

The fact is that the United States was founded on the proposition that all men are created equal. However that proposition has always been carried out less than perfectly, and at times not at all. Our system of government is resilient in some ways but also quite fragile, something that our founders understood; possibly better than we do. Adlai Stevenson noted something very important that we don’t hear often today. He said: “America is much more than a geographical fact. It is a political and moral fact — the first community in which men set out in principle to institutionalize freedom, responsible government, and human equality.”

But as I said, that ideal can be and often is undercut by the desire of certain groups and individuals to deny those freedoms to others. Donald Trump and his MAGA Dictatorship today, but instead of gangs of private citizens terrorizing immigrants, it is now Trump’s ICE who terrorize, seize, imprison and deport them, in a far greater display of contempt for the law and humanity than the Know Nothings ever demonstrated.

The Unitarian pastor, abolitionist, and leading Transcendentalist thinker, Theodore Parker wrote:

“Our national ideal out-travels our experience, and all experience. We began our national career by setting all history at defiance – for that said, “A republic on a large scale cannot exist.” Our progress since that has shown that we were right in refusing to be limited by the past. The practical ideas of the nation are transcendent, not empirical. Human history could not justify the Declaration of Independence and its large statements of the new idea: the nation went beyond human history and appealed to human nature.”

Theodore Parker’s words also prefigured an idea that Lincoln used in his address. Parker, like Lincoln believed that: “the American Revolution, with American history since, is an attempt to prove by experience this transcendental proposition, to organize the transcendental idea of politics. The ideal demands for its organization a democracy- a government of all, for all, and by all…”

Abraham Lincoln was blunt about this when he wrote to his friend Joshua Speed in 1855 after the Dred Scott Decision and during the height of the Know Nothing movement:

“As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”

Today we see many of the reminders of the Know Nothing movement raising their head in the nation and threatening the rights of citizens as well as others who come to this country longing for nothing more than to be free. Sadly, they are now in power.

The ideal that “all men are created equal” is that proposition that Lincoln understood when he dared to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, as well in his Gettysburg Address, and gave his support for the 13^th Amendment. We have to recall his words in the Gettysburg Address when he stated the proposition that the nation was founded upon in terms that cannot be misunderstood, and which even his opponents in the North who were as racist and anti-liberty as their Southern brothers understood and hated:

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal…”

That proposition was mocked in 1776, but it would become the rallying cry of people across Europe and be fought against by monarchies and despots everywhere. But it is that cry of freedom, that proposition that all men are created equal that we can never lose without losing who we are a people.

But as Lincoln said at Gettysburg, “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” The difference now is that Trump, the Republican Congress, and the Supreme Court are now those opposed to the principles and ideals of the Declaration. None of them believe that all men are created equal, and they are in the process of destroying the very principles for which millions of Americans of all races, creeds and colors fought to preserve, protect, defend and expand.

Lincoln’s address echoes the thought of historian George Bancroft, who wrote of the Declaration:

“The bill of rights which it promulgates is of rights that are older than human institutions, and spring from the eternal justice…. The heart of Jefferson in writing the Declaration, and of Congress in adopting it, beat for all humanity; the assertion of right was made for the entire world of mankind and all coming generations, without any exceptions whatsoever.”

Our nation might retain the name United States of American, but will be a husk of itself, a lifeless cadaver in which liberty was allowed to die because we as a people decided to let it happen. This is because too many Americans across the political spectrum today have given up on democracy, our system of government, and of the Declaration itself.

As such, it would be good to heed the words of Dr. Allen Guelzo, Professor of Civil War Studies at Gettysburg College, who wrote in the New York Times:

“The genius of the address thus lay not in its language or in its brevity (virtues though these were), but in the new birth it gave to those who had become discouraged and wearied by democracy’s follies, and in the reminder that democracy’s survival rested ultimately in the hands of citizens who saw something in democracy worth dying for. We could use that reminder again today.”

That is why I will continue to write about and speak about this every day until my dying day. I hope that you too will speak, write, protest, and resist no matter how long we must.

Until next time, resist, but watch your six. Trump’s Gestapo is watching.