Catholics and America

Many posts have discussed patriotism and the role of religion in American life.

Robert P. George at AEI:

With the breadth of Catholic history and teaching in mind, let us return to the underlying question with which we began: What should Catholic parents and teachers be imparting to children about our country and their role as citizens of this nation?

The answer is clear: American Catholics must teach our children to understand our country’s history, cherish and maintain its founding principles, and recognize that when we have gone wrong as a nation, it has been on those occasions when we have acted in defiance of those principles or failed to honor them.

We should teach young Catholic men and women to value our Constitution because the freedoms it protects allow us to pursue truth and goodness; they nurture and sustain our families, our communities, and our country’s civic order. And we must affirm to our children and our students that there is no reason to feel they must choose between being faithful Catholics and being patriotic Americans.

The Church does not teach that democracy is always required, or that it is the highest or best form of government. In fact, it does not pronounce any single best form of government, though it emphatically rejects certain types of government, especially totalitarian political systems such as fascism and communism. But democracy at its best does give expression — perhaps unique expression — to the principle of equal human dignity that the Church always and everywhere proclaims. Pope St. John Paul II referred to this inviolable human dignity during his visit to the United States in 1995:

Catholics of America! Always be guided by the truth — by the truth about God who created and redeemed us, and by the truth about the human person, made in the image and likeness of God and destined for a glorious fulfillment in the Kingdom to come. Always be convincing witnesses to the truth. “Stir into a flame the gift of God” that has been bestowed upon you in Baptism. Light your nation — light the world — with the power of that flame!

As John Paul also noted, “the continuing success of American democracy depends on the degree to which each new generation, native-born and immigrant, makes its own the moral truths on which the Founding Fathers staked the future of your Republic.” If this nation “under God,” as Abraham Lincoln put it in his Gettysburg Address, is to endure, we must continuously pray and work to ensure that our laws and our leaders truly honor that North Star principle — the ur-principle, as I sometimes describe it — of all sound morality: that of the profound, inherent, and equal dignity of each and every member of the human family.

The Founding and Its Enemies

Many posts have discussed the Founding.

Robert Kagan at WP:

Before the American Revolution no government had ever been founded on liberal principles, and the vast majority of human beings had never believed in these natural rights — certainly not the Christian church in either its Protestant or Roman Catholic versions nor Islam nor Judaism nor Hinduism nor Buddhism. People might be equal in the eyes of their god, but no government or religious institution had ever been based on the principle of equal rights. Not even the English system was based on this principle but rather on monarchy, a ruling aristocracy, and a contract between crown and subjects that was modified over the centuries but was not based on the principle of universal “natural” rights.

The Founders knew these ideas were radical, that they were inaugurating, in their own words, a novus ordo seclorum — a new order of the ages — that required a new way of thinking and acting. They knew, as well, that their own practices and those of 18th-century American society did not conform to their new revolutionary doctrines. They knew that slavery was contrary to the Declaration’s principles, though they permitted slavery to continue, hoping it would die a natural death. They knew that established churches were contrary to those principles because they impinged on that most important of rights, “freedom of conscience,” which was vital to the preservation of liberty, yet a number of states in the 18th and 19th centuries retained all kinds of religious tests for office. In short, they knew that a great many Americans did not in fact believe in the liberal principles of the Revolution. As Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, put it, “We have changed our forms of government, but it remains yet to effect a revolution in our principles, opinions and manners so as to accommodate them to the forms of government we have adopted.” They did not insist that citizens believe in those principles. One could be an American citizen whether one believed in the Declaration or not.

And a great many did not. Leaders of the slaveholding South called the Declaration “a most pernicious falsehood.” South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun called the very idea of equal rights a “false doctrine.” They believed in democracy, but only if it was an exclusively White democracy. When democracy turned against them in 1860, they rebelled and sought an exit from the system. That rebellion never ended. It has been weakened, suppressed — sometimes by force — and driven underground, but it has never gone away. Although the South was militarily defeated and deprived of its special advantages in the Constitution, its hostility to the Founders’ liberalism did not abate. As Southern writer W.J. Cash observed in 1941, if the war had “smashed the southern world,” it had nevertheless “left the essential southern mind and will … entirely unshaken” and Southerners themselves determined “to hold fast to their own, to maintain their divergences, to remain what they had been and were.” In 1956, almost a century after the Civil War, a fifth of Congress, almost all Democrats — signed the “Southern Manifesto” calling on states to refuse to obey the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision to end segregation in public schools. Nothing had changed. Are we so surprised that for many Americans, nothing has changed even today?

Nor has anti-liberalism only been about race. For more than a century after the Revolution, many if not most White Anglo-Saxon Protestants insisted that America was a Protestant nation. They did not believe Catholics possessed equal rights or should be treated as equals. The influential “second” Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s was anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish as well as anti-Black, which was why, unlike the original Klan, it flourished outside the South. Many regard today’s Christian nationalism as a fringe movement, but it has been a powerful and often dominant force throughout America’s history.

Franklin and the Declaration

 From the Ken Burns documentary on Benjamin Franklin:

 

Biden on Natural Rights

 President Biden  yesterday in Buffalo:

White supremacy is a poison. It’s a poison — (applause) — running through — it really is — running through our body politic. And it’s been allowed to fester and grow right in front of our eyes.

No more. I mean, no more. We need to say as clearly and forcefully as we can that the ideology of white supremacy has no place in America. (Applause.) None.

And, look, failure for us to not say that — failure in saying that is going to be complicity. Silence is complicity. It’s complicity. We cannot remain silent.

Our nation’s strength has always come from the idea — it’s going to sound corny, but think about it: What’s the idea of our nation? That we’re all children of God. All chil- — life, liberty, our universal goods — gifts of God. We didn’t get it from the government, we got it from — because we exist, and we’re called upon to defend them.

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Natural Rights and SCOTUS

Aaron Blake at WP:

In questions for the record released after her confirmation hearings, [Judge Katanji Brown]  Jackson declined to take a position on whether people have so-called “natural rights.”

Here’s the Q&A with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.):

Q: Do you hold a position on whether individuals possess natural rights, yes or no?
JACKSON: I do not hold a position on whether individuals possess natural rights.

Some conservative legal pundits highlighted the answer Friday, with the National Review writing that Jackson “doesn’t embrace the basic American creed set forth in that passage from the Declaration” of Independence. Cruz followed that up by calling it “stunning.” The conservative group FreedomWorks on Monday called the answer “unreal.” And Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) on Monday cited the answer as part of his rationale for voting against Jackson at a hearing Monday.

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The last time this concept took the main stage in Supreme Court confirmations was the late 1980s and early 1990s, when it came up in the hearings of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas. And the two Republican nominees actually took opposing views on it.

Bork argued for a strict adherence to the text of the Constitution — an original-intent judicial philosophy that made no space for the concept of natural rights, or at least for their role in jurisprudence. Specifically, Bork rejected the idea that the Ninth Amendment (that “enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people”) conferred a right to privacy — which the court used to grant the right to an abortion in Roe v. Wade. In a 1990 book after his nomination was defeated, Bork linked the natural-rights approach to a dangerous “impulse to judicial authoritarianism.”

Thomas, though, had spoken extensively about the role of natural rights in the law before his 1991 confirmation hearings. In a 1987 speech, he praised an article that said a fetus had an inalienable right to life guaranteed by the law of God in the Declaration of Independence. Thomas called it a “splendid example of applying natural law.”

The divergent approaches were spotlighted by none other than a senator by the name of Joe Biden, who was then the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. In a lengthy Washington Post op-ed on the topic, Biden wrote:

No issue divided Judge Bork and me as much as this single question: Are there fundamental rights — not explicit in the Constitution — that are protected by that document? My answer to that question, relying on principles of natural law, was an emphatic “yes” — a view that Judge Thomas, who has sharply criticized Judge Bork’s original-intent jurisprudence, appears to share.

SEE JUSTICE KAGAN'S CONFIRMATION HEARING

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Hamilton on Natural Rights

Tony Williams at RealClearPublicAffairs:

After serving a brief time in Congress, Hamilton became an attorney in New York. His dedication to natural-law justice prompted his courageous defense of the rights of unpopular Tories who had had their property confiscated under New York law. He believed that the laws violated equal justice, the rights of minorities, and the Peace Treaty of 1783. In January 1784, he wrote "Letter from Phocion," stating that a natural-rights republic “holds the rights of every individual sacred” and “punishes no man without regular trial.” Most famously, he represented a widow in Rutgers v. Waddington, making a case for judicial review when state laws conflicted with national ones, individual rights, and natural law.

During the 1780s, Hamilton joined the antislavery New York Manumission Society. He believed that slavery was a moral evil and a contradiction of any natural-rights regime. During the war, he had backed friend John Lauren’s plan to emancipate slaves in South Carolina if the slaves would bear arms for the patriot cause. Ultimately, though, abolition was not Hamilton’s main cause. He adopted a longer view, one devoted to building a well-governed republic that protected the inalienable rights of all.

Jefferson, 1619, and 1776

So does America's origin story lie in 1619 (the arrival of slavery) or 1776 (the Declaration)? At RealClear Public Affairs, S. Adam Seagrave argues for the latter:

We know that Jefferson lived far downstream of 1619. His livelihood and self-image depended squarely on his status as a slaveholder. In his well-known 1820 letter to John Holmes, Jefferson almost makes Silverstein’s either/or argument for him, saying about the predicament of Southern slaveholders such as himself: “Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.” Though many of us would like to think that 1776 weighs on the justice side of this scale, it is not clear whether Jefferson would agree. According to the author of the Declaration, 1776’s promise of “self-government and happiness” for himself and those like him was under threat during the Missouri crisis by devotees of the “abstract principle” dictating the geographic restriction of slavery.

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Contrary to Jefferson’s proud claim on his tombstone, there were many joint authors of the Declaration of Independence. It was adopted (after alteration) by the entire Continental Congress and largely expressed what Thomas Paine had called the American “common sense” and what Jefferson would later call “the American mind.” The more one reads of the public documents, pamphlets, sermons, and letters of the decades preceding and the years immediately following the Declaration of Independence, the more one realizes that Jefferson was really more stenographer than author. Jefferson was an original thinker, but the later accusation that he had plagiarized the Declaration contained more than a grain of truth.

The candidacy of 1776 as a meaningful and valuable constituent of American identity cannot, then, be buried along with Jefferson himself. The ideas of 1776 that were expressed in the Declaration—natural human rights, limited government by consent, the right of revolution—were shared equally by Jefferson and countless other individuals at his time, many of whom were not as clearly implicated by association with the evils really and symbolically unleashed in 1619. These ideas are something apart from any of the individuals at the time who espoused them.

The Declaration, the Constitution, and the Supreme Court

Jeffrey Rosen at WSJ:

Justice Clarence Thomas invoked the Declaration in his dissenting opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 case that legalized same-sex marriage. “Since well before 1787,” he wrote, “liberty has been understood as freedom from government action, not entitlement to government benefits.” Other conservatives now cite the Declaration to lay the groundwork for a Supreme Court challenge to Roe, which they claim violates the God-given right to life. When Alabama legislators recently passed a law banning abortion, they cited the Declaration, saying that “from conception … all men are created equal” and possess a fundamental right to life.

And just last week, Justice Elena Kagan quoted the Declaration in her dissenting opinion from the Court’s decision that partisan gerrymandering is a question for legislatures rather than for courts. “Is that how American democracy is supposed to work?” she asked, citing the Declaration’s insistence that governments derive “their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.”

Whether you are persuaded by Justice Thomas or Justice Kagan, it’s striking that the debate between conservatives and liberals on the Court continues to revolve around how to read the Constitution through the lens of the Declaration. How are we to balance its sometimes conflicting “self-evident” truths? That is the ongoing question of American politics and constitutional discourse.

Patriotism, Piety, and the Declaration

In 1938, Father Fulton Sheen said (h/t Ken Masugi):

The treatise on Patriotism in the writings of the greatest philosopher of all times, St. Thomas Aquinas, is to be found under the subject of “Piety.” This at first may strike as strange those who think of piety as pertaining only to love of God. But once it is remembered that love of neighbor is inseparable from love of God, it is seen that love of our fellow citizens is a form of piety.

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But where find the basis for the right of a man to be his own master, captain of his own soul, free in his right to pursue his ultimate end with a free conscience? Where root and ground the right to own property as the extension of personality? Where find the rock of all liberties which would be strong enough to withstand governments and powers and states which would absorb them as the monarchies did, then, and as certain dictatorships do now?

For such a foundation the Fathers looked first to England. There the theory was advanced that our liberties and rights are rooted in Parliament. This theory they rejected on the ground that if Parliament gives rights and liberties, then the Parliament can take them away. Next they looked to France, where it was held that the liberties and rights of man are rooted in the will of the majority. The Fathers equally rejected this on the ground that if the rights of man are the gift of the majority, then the majority can take away the rights of the minority.

Where find the source of the liberties and the rights of man? On what stable foundation are they to be reared? What is their source? The answer they gave was the right one. They sought the foundations of man’s rights and liberties in something so sacred and so inalienable that no State, no Parliament, no Dictator, no human power could ever take them away, and so they rooted them in God. Hence our Declaration of Independence reads: all men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights. . .among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

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We Catholics are taking religion so seriously in reference to our country that rather than see God perish out of our national life we conduct 7,929 elementary schools and 1,945 high schools, employing 58,903 and 16,784 teachers respectively. . . .and figuring on the basis of public school costs, we save the taxpayers of the country an immediate one billion dollar building program and, for maintenance, about $139,600,000 every year. Every cent of this money comes out of the pockets of Catholics, and why? Because we believe that the 2,102,889 children in Catholic elementary schools and 284,736 in Catholic high schools have a right to know the truth which makes them free.

In other words, we take very seriously the Declaration of Independence which derives the rights of man from God.

The Finality of the Declaration

Ninety years ago today, Calvin Coolidge said:

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.

Endowed by their Creator with Certain Unalienable Rights

Matt K. Lewis writes at The Week:

CNN anchor Chris Cuomo recently declared: "Our rights do not come from God." Then this week, Sen. Ted Cruz's assertion that "our rights don't come from man, they come from God Almighty" came under scrutiny when Meredith Shiner, a Yahoo reporter,tweeted: "Bizarre to talk about how rights are God-made and not man-made in your speech announcing a POTUS bid? When Constitution was man-made?" [Cruz was closely paraphrasing JFK.]

I am astounded by how many people in this country (and particularly in the media) don't believe the Declaration of Independence's assertion that all men are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights." The Declaration of Independence also refers to "The Laws of Nature and of Nature's God." Believing that our laws are God-given, and not man-made, has become something that secular liberals seem to take joy in openly mocking. As if there were something inherently funny or backwards about faith. As if there were something hollow and foolish about believing in God....

Without an absolute law that transcends the whims of man, the very concept of "rights" metastasizes into a definition having more to do with the current and often capricious preference of the majority. Oppressed minorities have long found comfort (and, in fact, seized the moral high ground) by pointing out that there is a greater law, a universal sense of right and wrong, that transcends the will of the majority.

The majority can be wrong. The majority can be in the wrong. History is littered with examples of the folly of man-made law, of man-made injustice. (This is not to say people haven't done terrible things in the name of God — they have!)

Consider Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from a Birmingham Jail": "We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights," he wrote. "To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law."

More and more, the secular left seems to want to entrust human law to always be just. That's fine when it is. But what happens when it isn't?

Cruz Channels JFK

Ted  Cruz announcement: "What is the promise of America? The idea that — the revolutionary idea that this country was founded upon, which is that our rights don’t come from man. They come from God Almighty."

John F. Kennedy inaugural address: "And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe--the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God."

Where Rights Come From

At Commentary, Peter Wehner writes:

In a recent interview, Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore told CNN anchor Chris Cuomo, “Our rights, contained in the Bill of Rights, do not come from the Constitution, they come from God.”

“Our rights do not come from God,” Cuomo replied. “That’s your faith. That’s my faith. But that’s not our country.” (For this portion of the exchange, see starting around the 13:00 minute mark.)

In fact, Mr. Cuomo is wrong and Judge Moore is right, at least in the context of America and its history. To understand why, it’s important to point out that the Constitution is America’s governing charter, one that sets up a structure of government. To be sure, the Bill of Rights lay out certain rights the people are entitled to against every government on earth. But to understand where those rights come from, what their source is, one needs to turn to the Declaration of Independence. And here is what the Declaration states:

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 – That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men…

It could hardly be clearer, then: Governments are instituted in order to secure rights that are God-given. And faith in divinely given rights is a consistent theme not only of the founders but of nearly every president. John F. Kennedy, in his inaugural address, crystalized the point this way: “Yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe–the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.”
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Where Mr. Cuomo goes off the rails is in asserting that “it is not our country” to say our rights come from God. This actually is a philosophical thread that runs throughout the history of our country with astonishing consistency and, at least until now, a proposition very few people disputed. So Mr. Cuomo’s statement is not only wrong; it is historically illiterate.

Natural Law and the American Creed

An earlier post excerpted Brian Vanyo's article on the origins of the American creed.  He has a new piece on the creed's meaning:

In the very first sentence of the Declaration of Independence, our founders wrote that the American people were breaking from British rule to live by the tenets of Natural Law — “to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and coequal station to which the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God entitle them.” To understand the meaning of our creed, we must come to know Natural Law.

Natural Law philosophy, which was first developed over 2,000 years ago, is the idea that universal laws govern all human interactions and that these laws, or truths, are discoverable by human reason. Aristotle wrote in Rhetoric (ca. 350 BC), “Universal law is the Law of Nature. For there really is, as everyone to some extent divines, a natural justice and injustice that is binding on all men, even on those who have no association or covenant with each other.”
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Government is therefore bound to respect the people’s life, liberty, and property, because, as Alexander Hamilton explained, the universal Law of Nature is always and everywhere supreme:

Good and wise men, in all ages ... have supposed that the Deity ... has constituted an eternal and immutable law, which is, indispensably, obligatory upon all mankind, prior to any human institution whatever.

This is what is called the Law of Nature, “which, being coeval with mankind and dictated by God Himself, is, of course, superior in obligation to any other. It is binding over all the globe, in all countries, and at all times. No human laws are of any validity, if contrary to this; and such of them as are valid, derive all their authority, mediately, or immediately, from this original.” Blackstone.

Upon this law, depend the natural rights of mankind.

This is the meaning of our creed. We are a free people who joined in society to live by the principles of Natural Law — principles that became the purpose for our union, the cause for our independence, and the foundation for our government. These principles, of course, were proclaimed with conviction in our Declaration of Independence, which Thomas Jefferson later regarded as the “Declaratory Charter of our rights and the rights of man.”

The American Creed

In his second inaugural address, President Obama repeatedly referred to the American creed.  At RealClearHistory, Brian Vanyo discusses the origins of this creed, with specific reference to the Tea Act crisis of 1773:

The Tea Act was designed primarily to prop up the struggling British East India Tea Company by granting it a license to export its tea duty-free to North America. But it also aimed to undercut the price of tea being smuggled into America — tea that many Americans bought to evade the tea tax imposed by Parliament’s 1767 Townshend Acts. The effect of the Tea Act was that Company tea became cheaper (even with the Townshend tax) than smuggled tea, thereby presenting the American people with a corrupt bargain. They could buy Company tea at lower cost, but by doing so they would be implicitly accepting Parliament’s right of direct taxation in America.

The American people rejected the tea altogether. When a shipment of Company tea arrived in Boston in December 1773, Samuel Adams famously led the Sons of Liberty in an attack on the ship and tossed the tea into the harbor. This brazen act demonstrated that the American people were committed to liberty at all costs — that they would not betray their principles even when doing so might benefit them financially.

The Boston Tea Party made the Revolutionary War practically inevitable, for Parliament responded in 1774 by passing the Intolerable Acts, which then prompted the American people to convene the First Continental Congress.

At Philadelphia in 1774, the First Continental Congress requested the British government to redress its many grievances, but it also proclaimed in the Declaration of Colonial Rights the sacred principles upon which the American political union was based. In the very first resolution of this document, Congress declared that the American people, “by the immutable Laws of Nature ... have the following rights: ... that they are entitled to life, liberty and property; and they have never ceded to any foreign power whatsoever, a right to dispose of either without their consent.”

Letter from Birmingham Jail

In 1963, Birmingham police jailed Martin Luther King for leading a nonviolent protest against the city's segregation.  Several Alabama clergymen expressed disagreement with King's tactics.  From his cell, he answered their objections.

In his classic "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Dr. King discussed natural law with language reflecting his religious background.

You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, it is rather strange and paradoxical to find us consciously breaking laws. One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: There are just laws and there are unjust laws. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with Saint Augustine that "An unjust law is no law at all."

Now what is the difference between the two? How does one determine when a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of Saint Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. To use the words of Martin Buber, the great Jewish philosopher, segregation substitutes an "I-it" relationship for an "I-thou" relationship, and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. So segregation is not only politically, economically, and sociologically unsound, but it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Isn't segregation an existential expression of man's tragic separation, an expression of his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? So I can urge men to obey the1954 decision of the Supreme Court because it is morally right, and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances because they are morally wrong.

Lincoln on the Declaration

In observance of Independence Day, Rich Lowry writes:

When Abraham Lincoln began his speech at the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery in 1863 with those words redolent of the King James Bible, “four score and seven years ago,” he referred back to 1776, not 1787.

It was the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution, that animated Lincoln’s project to return mid-19th-century America to our “ancient faith.” For Lincoln, the path of salvation for a country torn by contention over slavery ran through the past: “Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust. Let us re-purify it. Let us turn and wash it white, in the spirit, if not the blood, of the Revolution.”

In his first debate with Stephen Douglas in 1858, Lincoln said:

This declared indifference, but, as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I cannot but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world,—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites; causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty,—criticising the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.

In his fifth debate, he rebutted the myth that the Declaration did not apply to African Americans:

The Judge has alluded to the Declaration of Independence, and insisted that negroes are not included in that Declaration; and that it is a slander upon the framers of that instrument, to suppose that negroes were meant therein; and he asks you: Is it possible to believe that Mr. Jefferson, who penned the immortal paper, could have supposed himself applying the language of that instrument to the negro race, and yet held a portion of that race in slavery? Would he not at once have freed them? I only have to remark upon this part of the Judge’s speech (and that, too, very briefly, for I shall not detain myself, or you, upon that point for any great length of time), that I believe the entire records of the world, from the date of the Declaration of Independence up to within three years ago, may be searched in vain for one single affirmation, from one single man, that the negro was not included in the Declaration of Independence; I think I may defy Judge Douglas to show that he ever said so, that Washington ever said so, that any President ever said so, that any member of Congress ever said so, or that any living man upon the whole earth ever said so, until the necessities of the present policy of the Democratic party, in regard to slavery, had to invent that affirmation. And I will remind Judge Douglas and this audience that while Mr. Jefferson was the owner of slaves, as undoubtedly he was, in speaking upon this very subject he used the strong language that “he trembled for his country when he remembered that God was just;” and I will offer the highest premium in my power to Judge Douglas if he will show that he, in all his life, ever uttered a sentiment at all akin to that of Jefferson.

The Meaning of the Declaration

To observe the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, in 1926, President Coolidge gave a remarkable speech:

In its main features the Declaration of Independence is a great spiritual document. It is a declaration not of material but of spiritual conceptions. Equality, liberty, popular sovereignty, the rights of man these are not elements which we can see and touch. They are ideals. They have their source and their roots in the religious convictions. They belong to the unseen world. Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish. We can not continue to enjoy the result if we neglect and abandon the cause.

We are too prone to overlook another conclusion. Governments do not make ideals, but ideals make governments. This is both historically and logically true. Of course the government can help to sustain ideals and can create institutions through which they can be the better observed, but their source by their very nature is in the people. The people have to bear their own responsibilities. There is no method by which that burden can be shifted to the government. It is not the enactment, but the observance of laws, that creates the character of a nation.

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.

King on Natural Law

As we explain in the textbook (p. 216), Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. believed that right and wrong were not matters of mere custom. He spelled out his view in his 1963 letter from Birmingham Jail:

How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an "I-it" relationship for an "I-thou" relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and awful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression of man's tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.

Surveys from the Center for the Constitution and the National Constitution Center

The Center for the Constitution at James Madison's Montpelier has surveyed Americans' understanding of the Constitution. Some highlights:

We asked several basic knowledge questions about government power that come directly from the Constitution. In the case of making and regulating money and making treaties, people knew that these were powers of the federal government at the same rate they reported understanding “some” or “a lot” of the Constitution. However, on the question of regulating interstate commerce, only 61% of the general public knows that this is a power reserved to the federal government.

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Some of the confusion could come from our unique form of government. Federalism does require a sharing of certain powers, but Americans are mixed on whether or not there is a clear division of power between the state and federal governments. When asked which level of government has more power, 70% of the people think the division of power favors the federal government over the states. Only about 8% think the states have more power and 22% think the balance is about right.

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Given the Founders’ great concern that the national government not become too powerful, it is a bit discouraging that only 35% of Americans believe that the Constitution limits government power. The differences between Democrats and Republicans regarding views of government power are illustrative perhaps of their philosophies. Democrats are much more likely to believe (45.5%) that governmental power is limited than are Republicans (29.5%), Independents (29.1%) or others (31.7%). Interesting differences are found between people in different age groups and levels of educational attainment.

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One of the most important philosophical beliefs of the founders was in the “natural rights” of humans. It is disappointing that only 68% of the population believes that their rights to free speech and freedom of religion among others, are natural rights. Interestingly, 18-24-year-olds understand the source of basic rights better than the older age groups (82.2% versus 63.7% to 69.7%). No other demographic grouping had such stark differences.

The National Constitution Center (a different organization) and the Associated Press released their own poll. From the AP report:

Glum and distrusting, a majority of Americans today are very confident in — nobody.

Of what confidence there is in institutions, the military and small business are at the top in an Associated Press-National Constitution Center poll released Thursday. But even they get very-confident or better ratings from well under half the people.

Blogs, banks and Congress get the most distrust.

What would people change if they were in charge? The poll found growing sentiment for legal protections for same-sex couples, with 58 percent saying they should have the same government benefits as married heterosexuals and nearly as many backing federal recognition of gay marriage. Respondents overwhelmingly opposed a stronger federal hand in two other areas: enhancing presidential powers to bolster the economy and requiring people to buy health insurance, as this year's health care overhaul law does.

Full poll results are here.