The Old Republic and Obama's America
"Second Term Begins With a
Sweeping Agenda for Equality," ran the eight-column banner in which The
Washington Post captured the essence of Obama's second inaugural. There
he declared:
"What binds this nation together ... what makes us exceptional --
what makes us American -- is our allegiance to an idea, articulated in a
declaration made more than two centuries ago."
Obama then quoted our Declaration of Independence:
"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."
Our "union," Obama went on, was "founded on the principles of liberty and equality."
Nice prose -- and transparent nonsense.
How could the American Union have been founded on the principle of
equality, when "equality" is not mentioned in the Constitution, the Bill
of Rights or the Federalist papers? How could equality be a founding
principle of a nation, six of whose 13 original states had legalized
slavery, and five of whose first seven presidents owned slaves all their
lives?
What Obama preached in his inaugural was not historical truth but
progressive propaganda, an Orwellian rewrite of American history.
Undeniably, the post-Civil War 13th, 14th and 15th amendments
established an equality of constitutional rights. And from the Brown
decision of 1954 through the civil rights acts of the 1960s, there was
established an equality of civil rights. Black Americans were assured
equal access to schools, public accommodations, the voting booth and
housing. And Congress and the people overwhelmingly supported those
laws.
But if the nation did not establish equality of constitutional
rights until the 1860s and equality of civil rights until the 1960s, how
can Obama claim that "equality" has been the feature that "makes us
American" and "binds this nation together."
How can he say that our commitment to equality is what makes us
"exceptional" -- when every Western country believes in equal rights for
all of its citizens, and it was the French Revolution, not ours, that
elevated "egalite" to a founding principle.
And when he says equality "is the star that guides us still," exactly what kind of equality is Obama talking about?
Answer: The equality of which Obama speaks is not an equality of
rights but an equality of results, an idea that dates not to the
Founding Fathers, who would have been appalled by the idea, but to the
1960s.
This equality is not a founding principle of the republic. It is
ideological contraband. For such equality can only be achieved at the
price of freedom, our true founding principle.
That idea that "all of us are created equal -- is the star that
guides us still," said Obama in his inaugural, "just as it guided our
forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall."
Astonishing. The president is here making the brazen claim that the
roots of modern feminism and gay rights can be traced straight back to
the Founding Fathers and founding principles of our republic.
But how? The sanctum sanctorum of modern feminism is Roe v. Wade,
the discovery of a constitutional right to an abortion. Yet, for every
generation of Americans before 1973, abortion was a heinous crime.
And can anyone seriously argue that a barroom brawl with cops by
homosexual patrons of Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village in 1969 was but
another battle in the long war for liberty begun at Lexington, Concord
and Bunker Hill?
How could that be, when the author of the declaration Obama cites,
Thomas Jefferson, believed homosexuality should be treated as rape, and
George Washington ordered homosexuals drummed out of his army?
What Obama was attempting at the Capitol, with his repeated lifts
from Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, was to portray his own and his
party's egalitarianism as a continuation of the great cause that
triumphed at Yorktown and Appomattox.
He is hijacking the American Revolution, claiming an ancestral lineage for his ideology that is utterly fraudulent and bogus.
Feminism, the gay rights movement and the post-1965 civil rights
movement, with their demand for equality not simply of rights but of
rewards, cannot be achieved without trampling on the freedoms for which
the patriot fathers fought. And they cannot triumph without creating a
permanent, mammoth and redistributionist state more powerful, intrusive
and dictatorial than anything George III ever dreamed of.
The freedom of all Americans to compete academically, athletically,
artistically and economically must inevitably result in an inequality
of incomes, wealth and rewards.
Why? Because all men and women are by nature and nurture unequal.
Some are talented, ambitious, industrious, lucky. And in a free society,
such men and women will always reap a disproportionate share of fame
and fortune.
The only way to equalize rewards is to take from those who have
earned and give to those who have not. And that requires the kind of
redistributionst regime the Founding Fathers would have risen up
against.
As Obama's America rises, the old republic falls.
