Does the Declaration of Independence still guide our country? That seems a very fitting question for us to think about as we get ready to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of this document that formed the foundation of this nation we love.
That question has been on my mind after reading an article in The Epoch Times about an address given by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas at an April gathering at the University of Texas to celebrate our 250th.
Thomas posed the question of whether the principles of the Declaration can continue to stand. The justice believes that America is “not just a political arrangement” but a “moral proposition” and wonders if we have the backbone as a people to uphold the document’s famous words, including these: “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 forefathers believed that human beings possess inherent dignity. Not because any government says so, but because their Creator – God – says so. In their mind, government exists to secure the people’s rights, not to decide what those are.
This has been the conservative viewpoint over time. Citizens have the right to free speech, to worship as they please, to defend their homes.
However, progressive thinkers over the last century or so – such as President Woodrow Wilson – have believed that America’s institutions, programs and agencies should change as society changes. Government is the engine of progress, and its job is to expand.
But the men who built our foundation knew their world history. They knew that whenever rulers – however well-intentioned – were permitted to define rights rather than protect them, rights become conditional.
Thomas reminds us that the 20th century was not short on world leaders who believed that individual rights needed to be brushed aside to create a “better” world. Men like Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and Mao all subordinated people’s rights, promising that the sacrifice of rights would yield a higher good. The results were not utopias, but graveyards.
Thomas insists that America does not have immunity to these kinds of results simply by virtue of good intentions. The expansion of government may at first seem generous – free food, services, healthcare – but the government that can grant these can also take them away. Is that where we want to be? Or do we want to encourage people to work and strive and create, to fulfill their Creator’s plans for their lives through their own efforts and not that of their government?
In honor of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, there will be celebrations, and they are warranted. What was declared in Philadelphia in 1776 was extraordinary – the formal insistence that legitimate government derives its authority from the consent of the governed, and that certain rights precede that government entirely.
But if the principles of the Declaration are invoked at parades and forgotten in policy, then what continues is not the American experiment; it is something else entirely.
Do we still believe what our founding fathers believed, and are we prepared to defend it? America, at its best, is the ongoing argument that human dignity precedes political power. That argument is worth making – and worth winning.