Guest post by Amezuki, not by Gary Farber
You all know me by a different pseudonym, and I'll reintroduce myself properly later.
But in the meantime, a word from our Founders:
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.
The Declaration of Independence stands, in my mind, as one of the greatest political documents in history.
Like our Constitution, it stands on the shoulders of many other exalted works, and my opinion is not in any way intended to denigrate those works–but what makes it stand out in my mind is not just the role it had in the birth of our nation, but in the simple, unequivocal and straightforward statements of first principles it contains.
Foremost among these is the well-known passage I quoted above. Its evocative power was such that Martin Luther King, one of the most eloquent speakers and users of language our nation has known, had no need to embellish it further when quoting it, save to correctly note that it was a promise our country had yet to fully honor. "All men are created equal."
Think about that for a moment. All men. You will notice a distinct lack of footnotes, equivocation, qualifications or exceptions to the word "all".