IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,
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.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
- He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
- He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
- He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
- He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
- He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
- He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
- He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
- He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
- He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
- He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
- He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
- He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
- He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
- For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
- For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
- For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
- For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
- For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
- For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
- For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
- For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
- For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
- He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
- He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
- He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
- He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
- He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.
We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
*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. *
That is some beautiful writing. Encapsulating a sentiment and belief briefly and distinctly.
Oh and that posting will get you moderated on Facebook.
I’m posting it on Facebook. We really ought to post it every day anyway.
Happy Birthday, United States of America! Thank you for taking my ancestors (from Poland, Ireland, and Germany, in descending order of their contribution to my genes) in. Thank you for the freedoms that I enjoy today.
What follows is quite long by comment-posting standards, so I beg your forbearance. It arrived in my e-mail this morning, sent by Robert Shibley, the executive director of The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, an organization to which I give some financial support. I think that is an excellent defense of two of our rights (speech and press) – the two that the FIRE spends most of its time defending.
The First Amendment Is For All Americans, Regardless of Their Politics
Should all of our fellow Americans enjoy the right to free speech?
Tomorrow, we as a nation will have 242 years under our belt, and I’m happy to report that after nearly a quarter of a millennium, most of us continue to answer “yes” to this important question. But this outcome was hardly inevitable. For much of the last century, political forces in our nation, most of them on the political right, fought to make sure they didn’t.
They repeatedly lost. Could Americans be forced to salute the flag? Kept from joining the Communist Party? Prohibited from protesting the Vietnam war in school? Denied the ability to use swear words, or to look at “indecent” publications? No, no, no, and no.
Yet despite this record of losses, an increasing number of thought leaders on today’s political left now appear to be talking themselves into launching their own long war against the very First Amendment principles that enabled them to argue for the societal changes they so value.
For example, a front-page article in Sunday’s New York Times was titled “How Conservatives Weaponized the First Amendment.” The story quotes a number of left-leaning figures, including feminist scholar Catharine MacKinnon and consumer advocate Ralph Nader, who signal their frustration with recent court cases protecting conservative speech.
Another academic cited in the article, Georgetown Law professor Louis Seidman, recently made waves in legal circles with a forthcoming law review article whose title asks, “Can free speech be progressive?” He asserts, “The answer is no,” lamenting that progressives “just can’t shake their mindless attraction to the bright flame of our free speech tradition.”
Mindless? The modern era of First Amendment jurisprudence turns 100 this year. Regardless of your political persuasion, it’s awfully hard to argue that the United States of 2018 is less progressive than it was in 1918—a year in which universal women’s suffrage, for instance, was still two years away.
Those on the left who argue that it’s time to jettison our nation’s uniquely liberal conception of free speech are making a grievous mistake, but not a new one. British philosopher John Stuart Mill identified this error in his famous 1859 tract On Liberty, and his observation is as accurate now as it was the day he wrote it.
“All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility,” wrote Mill. “[W]hile every one well knows himself to be fallible, few think it necessary to take any precautions against their own fallibility, or admit the supposition that any opinion of which they feel very certain, may be one of the examples of the error to which they acknowledge themselves to be liable.”
The underlying assumption of the new First Amendment critics is that it is self-evident that progressive positions (whatever those may be) are correct. Therefore, if the application of free speech principles makes accomplishing their aims more difficult, it’s freedom of speech that is the problem. There can be little doubt that Anthony Comstock, Joseph McCarthy, and the myriad other right-leaning censors of the past felt the very same way when the ideals of free speech got in the way of their own plans to “improve” American society.
Censors of all stripes worry that without proper guidance and regulation, our society might make the “wrong” choices, as determined by, well, them. But policies adopted under conditions where all sides have a right to be heard carry the legitimacy they do precisely because free discussion and debate increase people’s confidence in the conclusions that are ultimately reached. As Mill also wrote, “Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion, is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action.”
Whether in science, in a criminal trial, or in society at large, there is no reason to trust a conclusion that was reached without access to and consideration of all of the relevant information—the very information that censors wish to suppress.
Furthermore, the idea that freedom of speech has ceased to be of use to those on the political left simply doesn’t comport with reality. Within just the last year, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education used the First Amendment to successfully vindicate the rights of college students in Iowa to advocate for marijuana legalization, and in Illinois, to pass out flyers attacking capitalism. Was this not helpful to progressive causes?
Sometimes those seeking recourse through the First Amendment are not discernibly members of either the right or the left; sometimes, the expression at issue isn’t political at all. For example, in the past few years, the Supreme Court has struck down laws that restricted the kinds of signs that could be placed in public areas and that provided for the punishment of people who pretend to be decorated veterans for their own personal gain.
What’s more, the fact that the logic of freedom of speech can be used by both sides, or that your side can’t win them all, is hardly a new discovery. The principles are viewpoint-neutral. They can be utilized by all of us, regardless of our ideological bent. In the campus context, for example, FIRE uses the same legal arguments to defend a student’s right to pass out flyers about animal abuse as we do when defending a libertarian student group trying to hand out copies of the Constitution.
Especially in today’s hyper-polarized politics, labeling an idea or proposition as merely a weapon for, or a conspiracy by, the other side is akin to giving partisans a permission slip to turn off their brains. It’s an easy, expedient measure that gives your “team” one less thing to think about in a world deluged with news and information. It’s much harder to step back and consider that what you see as a “sword” in the hands of your opposition—a metaphor sometimes used by the left-leaning thinkers discussed above—might look a whole lot more like a shield to the other side.
Trying to see the argument from the other side is hard work. But then, governing a heterogeneous nation of more than 300,000,000 is hard work, and in our political system, we all share in that responsibility. When asked on the last day of the Constitutional Convention what kind of government the Framers had produced, Benjamin Franklin famously replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” The First Amendment, and the culture of free speech for which it serves as a touchstone, is a key part of what makes our great experiment work.
If we intend to keep our nation healthy into its 243rd year and beyond, we had better continue to avoid the temptation to forcibly silence our opponents rather than persuade them to our side. On this Independence Day, FIRE pledges to continue its work to ensure that the promise of free speech for all continues to be a reality—regardless of our political disagreements.
About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.
Calvin Coolidge
The scariest Independence Day for me was when I was about 10 yo and a firecracker went off by my right ear and I had ringing in the ear for about 3 days. Suddenly… “And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air” had special meaning.