The Declaration of Independence is one of the most profound documents in human history. Today is the anniversary of it’s adoption by the American states.
Despite it’s prominence in our history, it has no hold in our law.
Everyone knows the the main phrase from the Declaration
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.
And yet we, as a country, claim rights for our citizenry that we deny to others. We make excuses for how we allow ourselves to treat humans being we hold in our custody.
The only right an American should have over any other human on American soil is to stay on American soil.
Whether it’s extreme rendition, or lack of habeus corpus rights of foreign nationals we detain, our freedom has become one of the King citizens, by the King citizens, and for the King citizens.
Not unlike the King whose shackles we sought to throw off, we have long forgotten that we used to believe of all men. We used 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”.
If we want all men to be equal, we should treat them all equally.
Edit: If you missed the news this week, and I did, it was revealed that our “coercive management techniques” chart used at Guantánamo Bay (and presumably elsewhere) came verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Communist Chinese torture techniques used to illicit mostly false confessions. Are we outraged yet?
I don’t know about everyone else, but I am in a constant state of low-level outrage. I say “low-level” because it just takes too much effort & energy to maintain a level of full-blown outrage. The train left the tracks long, long before we ever got to Guantanamo, but I agree, the current actions of our government have raised the bar of purely despicable behavior way beyond any I would ever have imagined possible.
“And the sheep looked up……..”
What Patriotism Is, and Is Not.
An opinion piece by Michael Winship.
History note…
The Magna Carta is one of the most significant agreements in history. The US Constitution was modeled after it for it made the King subject to the rule of law. And what was the principal law? The writ of habeas corpus.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta
Bush didn’t just take us to war and screw up the economy, he unraveled our democracy. Why there are people out there that still support him is beyond me? And yes, I did see the new poll touting an 18% approval with his direction of the country. That’s almost 1 in 5 asses.