Jefferson: All Men Are Created Equal - Obama: That’s Not Good Enough
In his 2nd inaugural address, Obama continued to flaunt his axiological misunderstanding of America’s founding doctrines. Obama conjures equal rights, an alien theory dis-kindred to greater than hexadecaroon degree of the equal protection guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. For reference, here’s the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
What does Obama really mean when he conjures “equal rights”? In a recent piece, Pat Buchanan insists that Obama’s promoting equality of results (another alien theory of adulterating collectivists):
“Second Term Begins With a Sweeping Agenda for Equality,” ran the eight-column banner in which The Washington Post captured the essence of Obama’s second inaugural. There he declared:
“What binds this nation together … what makes us exceptional – what makes us American – is our allegiance to an idea, articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago.”
Obama then quoted our Declaration of Independence:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Our “union,” Obama went on, was “founded on the principles of liberty and equality.”
Nice prose – and transparent nonsense.
How could the American Union have been founded on the principle of equality, when “equality” is not mentioned in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights or the Federalist papers? How could equality be a founding principle of a nation, six of whose 13 original states had legalized slavery, and five of whose first seven presidents owned slaves all their lives?
What Obama preached in his inaugural was not historical truth but progressive propaganda, an Orwellian rewrite of American history.
Undeniably, the post-Civil War 13th, 14th and 15th amendments established an equality of constitutional rights. And from the Brown decision of 1954 through the civil rights acts of the 1960s, there was established an equality of civil rights. Black Americans were assured equal access to schools, public accommodations, the voting booth and housing. And Congress and the people overwhelmingly supported those laws.
But if the nation did not establish equality of constitutional rights until the 1860s and equality of civil rights until the 1960s, how can Obama claim that “equality” has been the feature that “makes us American” and “binds this nation together.”
How can he say that our commitment to equality is what makes us “exceptional” – when every Western country believes in equal rights for all of its citizens, and it was the French Revolution, not ours, that elevated “egalite” to a founding principle.
And when he says equality “is the star that guides us still,” exactly what kind of equality is Obama talking about?
Answer: The equality of which Obama speaks is not an equality of rights but an equality of results, an idea that dates not to the Founding Fathers, who would have been appalled by the idea, but to the 1960s.
This equality is not a founding principle of the republic. It is ideological contraband. For such equality can only be achieved at the price of freedom, our true founding principle.
That idea that “all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still,” said Obama in his inaugural, “just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall.”
Astonishing. The president is here making the brazen claim that the roots of modern feminism and gay rights can be traced straight back to the Founding Fathers and founding principles of our republic.
But how? The sanctum sanctorum of modern feminism is Roe v. Wade, the discovery of a constitutional right to an abortion. Yet, for every generation of Americans before 1973, abortion was a heinous crime.
And can anyone seriously argue that a barroom brawl with cops by homosexual patrons of Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village in 1969 was but another battle in the long war for liberty begun at Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill?
How could that be, when the author of the declaration Obama cites, Thomas Jefferson, believed homosexuality should be treated as rape, and George Washington ordered homosexuals drummed out of his army?
What Obama was attempting at the Capitol, with his repeated lifts from Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, was to portray his own and his party’s egalitarianism as a continuation of the great cause that triumphed at Yorktown and Appomattox.
He is hijacking the American Revolution, claiming an ancestral lineage for his ideology that is utterly fraudulent and bogus.
Except from http://lewrockwell.com/buchanan/buchanan295.html
That’s a historical, but rather general view from Mr. Buchanan. What did Jefferson, the man who penned the words “all men are created equal”, mean by such a grand statement? For insight, let’s dive a little deeper and examine Jefferson’s correspondence with Adams in his letter affirming the “natural aristocracy“, and denouncing what he called the “artificial aristocracy” of the generationally privileged.
I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents… [t]he natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature, for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society. And indeed, it would have been inconsistent in creation to have formed man for the social state, and not to have provided virtue and wisdom enough to manage the concerns of the society.
This natural aristocracy is a common sense and pragmatic means of separating “the wheat from the chaff”, as Jefferson put it. He considered merit among men to be the most precious gift of nature where each man is equal in his freedom to use this gift - a gift at each man’s fingertips which has no artificial barrier, and requires no privilege or permission of use. Equal.
To put a finer point on separating the wheat from the chaff, Jefferson continues with a description of his model for higher education.
[D]ivide every county into wards of five or six miles square, like your townships; to establish in each ward a free school for reading, writing, and common arithmetic; to provide for the annual selection of the best subjects (read: students) from these schools, who might receive, at the public expense, a higher degree of education at a district school; and from these district schools to select a certain number of the most promising subjects, to be completed at a university, where all the useful sciences should be taught. Worth and genius would thus have been sought out from every condition of life, and completely prepared by education for defeating the competition of wealth and birth for public trusts.
Here we glean that Jefferson wasn’t opposed to the use of public funds for education as long as students earned, by their individual “virtue and talents”, to continue their education at the public’s expense.
Jefferson, the man who wrote, “all men are created equal” envisioned American advancement based entirely on merit. As a member of the natural aristocracy, “equal” is your birthright. This covenant has not been broken, but decades of usurpers like Obama have tried to supplant the bedrock of our society with mushy sanguine tropes of “equality” derived from collectivist thinkers alien to our land and substance.
