Thank You Mr. Jefferson!
Few people have taken the time to read the Declaration of Independence, and fewer still appreciate the document as the foundation of American understandings of law. It is, in my opinion, a legal document far more binding than the Constitution:When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
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, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. Revolutionary hardly describes the content. No longer the right of kings, law is establshed by nature. No longer might making right, law is commonly established by social contract. No longer immutable and ironclad, laws are compacts enacted by consenting parties.
No longer is law the tyrrany which keeps men enslaved, law becomes the compact by which men are made free.
The Declaration of Independence is a triumph of liberty over license, of liberty over tyrrany. Jefferson rightly considered it his boldest achievement, next to his Statute of Religious Freedom and the founding of the University of Virginia.
In that spirit, I dredged up an old post of mine on Jefferson' opinions on common law, natural law, and Christianity entitled Sing Tantarara, rogues all, rogues all!. Jefferson's thoughts and works should be given special thought on our Independence Day, and we should all consider what makes the American experiment so unique amongst other "revolutionaries" around the world.
Happy Independence Day!
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D.J. McGuire 
7 Comments:
The essence of the U.S. Culture War is the struggle, the ideas beneath the issues, between those who follow the ideas of the American Revolution - the Conservatives and those who follow the ideas of the French Revolution - the Liberals.
You would do yourself and the world itself a great service by not allowing yourself to get sucked into the bad press that David McCollough is spreading about Jefferson.
Lengthy, but you'll never need to read another book on Jefferson again.
Gotta love the ones that try to tie Jefferson to Rousseau... and no matter how vigourously you explain why this cannot be, the blinders go up!
I argue the line of thinking for human secularism (a form of Paganism) is this: Diocletian-Rousseau-Hegel-Marx-Nietzche-Darwin-Lenin-Freud and then it branches to
1)-Hitler for Nazi Human Secularism 2) - Stalin-Mao-Castro-Ho Chi Minh -Pol Pot for Communist Human Secularism
3) -Freud-Kinsey-Marcuse for Liberal Human Secularism
I am sure others could help flesh out this ideological genealogy.
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