Fulfilling the Promises of Freedom

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I am a passionate advocate for the principles of natural rights as expressed in the Declaration of Independence. But I am also firmly convinced that our nation is far closer to living out those ideals today than at any time in the almost 230 years since that document was written. It has taken the extraordinary sacrifice of many great men and women, an enormous amount of social upheaval and even a civil war to put those principles into action, but it has brought us closer to making the promise of those self-evident truths a reality for a far higher proportion of our people.

At our nation's founding the principles of liberty, as inspiring as they were, were largely rhetorical. While declaring that all men were created equal and with an unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, many of our founding fathers, including the man who wrote those very words (and a personal hero to me, regardless of his obvious flaws), owned other human beings as slaves and denied them even the most basic dignities and self-determination. While speaking so eloquently of governments deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, they denied to more than half the population the right to have a voice in that government by voting. These were compromises and violations of the very words they gave to the world, but that's not the full story. Though the men were flawed and often hypocritical, the ideas they espoused were powerful.

The principles that they so eloquently announced to us did not end with their own flawed applications of them. They lived on and inspired generations of brave reformers who demanded that those words be turned into actions, from Lysander Spooner to Sojourner Truth to Susan B. Anthony to Martin Luther King, and yes, today to those who fight bravely for the extension of those promises to gays and lesbians. Time and time again, those words have been invoked by those who sought to make our nation a more perfect union, one dedicated to making those principles more than mere rhetoric, and nowhere more eloquently than in Martin Luther King's famous I Have a Dream speech:

In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. 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. This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The words of the Declaration continue to inspire us today, but they inspire all the more because so much has been done to make them a reality for historically oppressed groups. And it must be remembered that each step from rhetoric to reality was fought tooth and nail by those who preferred the status quo, and often fought with eerily similar rhetoric. Those who fought to extend the promises of the Declaration to the entire nation, not just a fortunate few, were at each step declared to be communists and heathens who sought nothing less than the destruction of decent civilization. The prominent Calvinist preacher James Henley Thornwell said of the civil war:

"The parties in this conflict are not merely abolitionists and slave-holders - they are atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, Jacobins on the one side and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other. In one word, the world is the battleground - Christianity and atheism the combatants, and the progress of humanity is at stake."

His words are still echoed today by many paleo-conservatives, and are still quoted with approval even by bestselling authors like Thomas Woods (for more on his particular lunacy go here, here and here). Any decent person must cringe at those words, but they were repeated again in opposition to allowing women the right to vote. As Sara Kean notes:

Suffragists were accused of fostering ties to Communism and sucking naive women into their organization with the intention of using them to further the communist cause. An article titled "Are Women's Clubs 'Used' by Bolshevists?" reads: "It is never the policy of the leaders to permit the rank and file members to know what their ultimate objective is...their leaders...are often in communication with the fountains of 'red propaganda'..." (Tarrant 3). Suffrage groups were discredited by their alleged link to radical groups. A notion was passed around that women's clubs were more for promoting the communist ideal than they were for achieving votes for women. This made the women who joined suffrage organizations look like tools for the furthering of the Communists' agenda: "some intelligent women are now convinced that the...legislative program being sponsored by women's organizations is a menace and that the women of America are being used for a purpose that is concealed from them" (Tarrant 3). Certainly, some suffrage leaders were connected to radical causes, but this passage indicated that the entire women's movement is an extension of Communism.

And one need hardly mention the torrent of vitriol coming from the pulpits against women's suffrage. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and many others were condemned as atheists and heathens out to destroy the God-ordained order of the family which demanded that the wife be subordinate to the husband. And the anti-suffrage movement argued that allowing women to vote would cause conflict in the home and an epidemic of divorces caused by political disagreements. And this nonsense persists to this day with such extreme rhetoric as Pat Robertson's infamous statement in a fund-raising letter:

Feminism is a socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.

During the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s, we find again the defenders of the status quo lobbing the same rhetorical bombs at those who fought bravely for an end to the Jim Crow laws that denied the full rights of citizenship to blacks. Martin Luther King was derided far and wide as a communist and a subversive, by the John Birch Society and even by the FBI. To this day, there are still groups that characterize the entire civil rights movement as nothing more than communists out to undermine Christian civilization. One such group calls King "a sexual degenerate, an America-hating Communist, and a criminal betrayer of even the interests of his own people" and even encourages people to download flyers to pass out in school that declare him to be "the Beast" himself.

Fast forward to today's movement for gay rights and - surprise, surprise - we're hearing the same rhetoric still. Allowing gays to marry their partner is part of an "ideology of evil," says the Pope, and it will lead to the "collapse of the family" and even, Mitt Romney says, imperil America's ability to lead the world. Rick Santorum tells us that "the future of our country hangs in the balance" over gay marriage and that it is a matter of our "ultimate homeland security." Kind of reminds you of Strom Thurmond's claim that desegregation would be "utterly destructive to the social, economic and political life of the Southern people", doesn't it?

At every step, as we have moved closer and closer to the ideal of having the principles of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness apply to everyone, the reactionaries have condemned the attempt as one that would destroy the very nation itself. Guess what? They were wrong, each and every time. And they're still wrong today. The principles found in the Declaration are powerful, but become far more powerful when applied universally rather than selectively. We have come a long way in doing so, but there is still more to be done. And it's time to tune out the voices of bigotry who, as always, seek to cover their prejudices in predictions of national crisis and damnation if those horrible heathens get their way.