Whose
Rights Are They Anyway?
America,
before it is anything else, is an idea. And that idea is expressed most clearly and forcefully in the second paragraph of the 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.”
Two
of three federal circuit judges of the Ninth Appellate District have ruled that
the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance are unconstitutional.
How do you suppose those judges would have ruled if the suit before them
had challenged the words “endowed by their creator” in the Declaration of
Independence?
If
you believe, as they do, that the
phrase “under God” has no place in the Pledge of Allegiance,
if you believe that our currency should not affirm our trust in God,
then you must believe that The Declaration of Independence is
unconstitutional as it stands.
Intellectual
honesty would demand that once we’ve stripped the Pledge of its reference to a
Creator, we must ultimately amend the Declaration to read:
“We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created
equal, that they have certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life,
Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
It’s
a simple edit. Merely take out the words “endowed by their Creator.” The
problem is, the day we do it is the
day we begin to be alienated from our most precious rights.
All
Americans agree that these rights are unalienable, which is
another way of saying nothing and no one can take them from us. What we seem to
disagree about is what exactly guarantees that. The Framers said the Creator and not the Constitution
make them unalienable. And they stuck to it, despite, as some now say,
contradicting themselves in the First Amendment.
In
1791, Fifteen years after writing and ratifying the Declaration, eleven of them
consumed by a terrible war of liberation, many of those self same men wrote and
ratified these words: “Congress
shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the
free exercise thereof.”
And
so here we are, in our third century of struggling to keep church and state
separate, and no resolution in sight.
It
does seem like there’s a contradiction. How
can it be that the Constitution and
the government that both arise from a truth that the Framers took to be self
evident, -- that our liberty comes from the Creator and no other
source, -- can then be forbidden to
make any reference to God in any
way, shape or form?
Before
we go rushing off into a Constitutional Convention to fix the careless
incompetence of the Founding Fathers, I
think we owe them at least the courtesy of trying to understand why they did
what they did.
After
all, these are the men that gave us a Constitution of checks and balances and
separated and enumerated powers in order to save us from ourselves. It seems
they knew a thing or two about human failings and the necessity of protecting
our precious liberty from those failings.
These
were men who feared the power of state-sponsored religion and yet the first and
most profound of their immortal declarations made reference to the Creator of us
all. Why? For the same reason they did everything else. Not
to establish a state church, but to make us free and keep us free.
These
were men who understood that the strict separation of the state and the church
does not imply the separation of the state and religion. The First Amendment
forbids the government from passing any law in support of any particular church. It also forbids the
government from persecuting any American for practicing any religious faith.
These
were men, who having created the Constitution, understood the deeper truth, that
the ultimate guarantor of the people’s liberty is not the Constitution but the
people’s faith in a Higher Power, and they understood that because they
understood human history.
Throughout
the approximately fifteen thousand years of human civilization,
men have been governed by the principle of the Divine Right of Kings.
The
king possesses the mandate of heaven. His tyranny, be it terrible or beneficent,
derives from God. Thus, any rebellion, any attempt to throw off the yoke
of the tyrant, is illegitimate by definition.
Think
of it! Up until the founding of the
American nation in 1789, all governments, all societies, all nations, all
civilizations, asserted the divine right of kings and the absolute subservience
of the common man. This
was the way of the world. Immutable as nature itself.
The
Founding Fathers understood the job at hand. The Divine Right of Kings had to be
supplanted as the moral principle underlying
legitimate government, by the Divine Rights of the common man.
A new nation. Conceived in Liberty.
A new world.
“We
hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they have
certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit
of Happiness.” -- Oh really. Says who?
Expressed
this way, who or what makes these rights unalienable? The Constitution itself?
But the Constitution is amendable, as we well know. Future governments could
convene a Constitutional Convention to reconsider what rights are unalienable
and what rights aren’t, to suit the convenience of the government of the day,
or some transitory hysteria that might sweep the nation.
And
if they did so, the people would have no moral recourse. How could any one
legitimately advocate rebellion, how could the people join together and rise
against tyranny, when the document that guaranteed their rights no longer
guaranteed those rights? The
people would find themselves alienated from their rights.
Only
by reference to a Higher Moral Law that lies beyond the reach of any
Constitution, and from which any Constitution derives its power, can our rights
to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness be guaranteed against the will of
any tyrannically inclined government.
There
is a higher law of right and wrong from which to derive human law and against
which all human law can and must be judged. Only by acknowledging a Creator as
the source of our unalienable rights can we be morally secure in our freedoms. That truth is self evident.
And
so it is that all Americans, whether they believe in a Creator or not, so long
as they cherish liberty for themselves, their children and their children’s
children, must unite in thanking God for the precious gift of freedom. Because
there is no one else to thank.
Mr.
Toastmaster?
copyright
2002 Joe Wiesenfeld
duplication of any kind prohibited