Tag Archives: Declaration of Independence

Jan 16 2017

Dribble Much?

Once again the Bangor Daily News has allowed itself to be the platform for anti-American dribble from the alt-left. Khalil Gibran Muhammed teaches that racism is the bedrock of US history and he’s come to Maine to inform us of this “truth”. No where in the BDN’s glowing coverage of Mr. Muhammad’s speech is there a slightest attempt to check the validity of his claims. To the contrary, a nominal perusal through historical fact would debunk Mr. Muhammad’s claims and the self-same nominal perusal through the religion Mr. Muhammad embraces, Islam, would expose the hypocrisy of accusing Americans of perpetrating slavery, when Islam is the overwhelming greatest perpetrator of slavery throughout history, its atrocities ongoing.

These flaming epitomes in the mind numbing study of the intellectual duplicitous standardizing of selective amnesia have become nauseatingly predictable but no less repulsive to those who strive to be objective thinkers. What is far more morally repugnant to any decent American on this day is that Mr. Muhammad speaks as a representative of the MLK Foundation. For it was Martin Luther King who understood the “bedrock” of this society, our Constitution, better than perhaps any of the great leaders of this Nation when he said these words:

“When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.”

Reverend King understood that in the bedrock of this civilization our Founders had placed the “promissory note” in the Founding Documents with the intent and belief that good people of this Nation, in the light of their faith in God and their love of freedom, would in time eradicate the stain of slavery from this Nation.

And they did so, spilling the blood of their own sons to cleanse this land. No other nation has accomplished what our nation has in fight against racial injustice. So I ask, if slavery is the bedrock of this society, how is it that so many have fought from its very inception and laid the groundwork step by step to destroy slavery? Does Mr. Muhammad think that if the foundational bedrock of this nation was slavery and racism that the slaves would have been freed and the Nation would have heeded the calls of Martin Luther King to follow the words of its own Constitution with all men? If slavery is the very fabric of our society, as Mr. Muhammad intimates, than how is it a majority of Americans abhor slavery and racism? In no other nation could King have voiced his concerns much less mount the call for equality with out being crushed. Why? because its in the bedrock of who we are, freedom for all. 

Martin Luther King understood the unique opportunity afforded to him in the true fabric of this nation. It was Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Mr. Muhammad disdains the very thing, the very hope, that was the bedrock of Dr. King’s hope and the bedrock of this Nation, that “all men are created equal and our endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”. On this day, let us remember the truth that Martin Luther King believed and not the lies that Mr. Muhammad imagines.

Dec 1 2016

Endowed

 

It’s a word that has many different connotations. For the purposes of this article, I would like to explore the denotative meaning in the Declaration of Independence, when our Founding Fathers declared, “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,”. It has been distressing to find how few know the value of this document, its meaning, and the ideal it declared, from which sprang a new Nation.

Often today when we say someone is “endowed”, it is accompanied with a wry grin or a flush of jealousy as we often are referring to certain physical characteristics, often gender specific, that make a individual more attractive in the beholder’s eye than, perhaps, the “average” person. While “the rest of us” struggle with feelings of inadequacy when in the presence of those that are “endowed”, the writers of the Declaration of Independence had a different perspective of the physical endowments of humanity that were inclusive to all humans, yes, even the much less than spectacular such as I. This springs from the words “unalienable rights”, which is directly linked to the word “endowed”.

The writers of our Founding documents also used the term “Natural Born Rights” interchangeably with with the term “unalienable rights” in their conversations concerning the founding documents. So whether you believe in a Creator or that you were simply born, you can be assured that the Founding Fathers were steadfast in their belief that certain truths were “self-evident”, that we are all “created” or born equal, and when formed in the womb we all are created or “endowed” with “certain” Natural Born or “unalienable” rights. These “certain” endowed rights differed from other natural endowments of prowess, intellect or beauty, of which mankind is not created equal, these “certain” endowments were not only endowed or hard wired into our very being, our DNA, but were the same for everyone, “equal”.

“Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”, these endowments are “certain” because they are few, specific, and without question, “self-evident”. The Founders did not write the Founding documents to prescribe or give us these rights; instead, these natural born rights are cited as evidence to the reasoning behind the Declaration of Independence. What was “self-evident” to them was that natural born right for Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness has been “endowed” in mankind from the beginning of time and that no ruler or system of governance could or should try to take it away.

This is the great contention of our day! Do our rights come from government or are created in us, natural born? Our Founding Fathers were willing to die for their belief that our rights are natural born not government issued.

But many of the political establishment dating back to Woodrow Wilson have despised the ideal declared in our Founding documents. Progressives have worked tirelessly since the turn of the century to relegate our rights to words on documents rather than the ideals the documents protect. Rights created by documents can be lawyered, wordsmithed, and debated into futility and absurdity, but if “certain rights” are “unalienable”, natural born, they cannot be dissuaded by the rulings of contentious men and women.

“Unalienable” means they cannot be separated, set apart, taken away, or divested from us because they are woven into the very fabric of our life being. Just as your fingerprint makes you unique, our “unalienable rights” unite us all as humankind. In those aspects, we are all the same.

Yes, some civilizations have allowed regimes to suppress their natural born rights, yet, despite the brutality of man, each child born dawns anew the natural born desire for Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. The gift that we have as Americans is the light of illumination that our Founders shined on the natural born freedoms we possess in the words they wrote in our Founding documents. In light of the confusion that surrounds us in these days, it behooves us as a people, so gifted and Blessed, to revisit the Foundation on which we stand free and learn its meaning.