... How confident should we be that the signers’ treatment of one another as equal co-creators of their common life implies any commitment to more universal equality?
One reason I have little confidence in that regard is that, as we all know and as Allen repeatedly acknowledges, many people within the territory of the nascent United States were excluded from the practice of declaring independence, and—to judge from that practice and subsequent political and social practices—from the ideals registered in the Declaration. Black Americans (free and slave), women, Native Americans, and the poorest white men were not included in the process of establishing the Continental Congress, the collective writing of the Declaration, or the implementation of liberal rights and political “equality.” My point in reminding us of this fact is not to condemn the drafters of the Declaration for acting wrongly in engaging in such exclusion (though wrong it was), nor to deny them credit for the political good they did do, through the Declaration and otherwise. The point is that their endorsement, sometimes explicit and sometimes implicit, of the exclusion must shape our interpretation of the ideals expressed and embodied in the Declaration itself.
Sunday, May 8, 2016
James Lindley Wilson: "The Declaration of Independence isn’t egalitarian enough"
From Crooked Timber's symposium on Danielle Allen's book here. A taste:
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James Lindley Wilson: "The Declaration of Independence isn’t egalitarian enough"
Doubling down on [Obama campaign official] Danielle Allen's questionable premise, that the D of I is "egalitarian" atall, at least "egalitarian" as wielded by the 21st century left. "Equality," as in "all men are created equal" was the Founders' chosen term: Why it needs to be perverted into the perverted French Revolution's égalité is reason enough to reject the entire premise of Allen's entire enterprise.
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.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/obamas-egalitarian-revolution/
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