By Edwin Cooney
Two days ago we celebrated the United States' 244th anniversary as an independent nation. Still, there's very little evidence that we, the sophisticated and well informed 21st century citizenry, have discovered our national soul! I insist our soul resides in the Declaration of Independence, because that's where our commitment to equality was born. "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."
As I was approaching voting age in the mid-1960s, ideological Conservatives began to openly quarrel with the literal applicability of the word "equal" or the concept of equality as it pertains to measuring the worthiness of people. The late great broadcaster Paul Harvey use to insist that of course there was no such thing as all men being equal. To that observation, he would dramatically insist: Mr. Lincoln himself was a splendid example of the fallacy of his own statement that all men are created equal! Lincoln, Mr. Harvey would insist, was far above mere equality!! Thus, Conservatives invariably threw down the gauntlet of liberty versus equality with liberty the natural winner. More about the reason for this deliberate quarrel later.
Thomas Jefferson, as one of the most powerful intellectuals and lawgivers of the 19th century, appealed to "nature's God" as being the foundation of American liberty. However, the man to whom the spirit of the Declaration of Independence came through to loudest and clearest was a Kentucky-born Illinois lawyer and legislator named Abraham Lincoln. Throughout his career in state and national politics, Mr. Lincoln asserted again and again that the law and the Constitution were the result of the proposition that all men are created equal. Hence, it was only natural that President Lincoln began his approximately three minute Gettysburg address thusly:
Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are CREATED EQUAL.
Now (he went on) we are engaged in a great civil war testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. Abraham Lincoln's dedication to the Constitution was, except from the standpoint of the most rabid secessionists, never in doubt. Mr. Lincoln's continuous reference to the equality of all the people rather than to their physical, emotional, spiritual, political or social inequities was deliberate. Essential as was the law and the Constitution, their ultimate value lay in "the better angels of our nature."
The equality of all, as I see it, identifies each person's essential being. Each of us is born with an aura -- a combination of presence and awareness which invariably links us to one another. Within that aura of existence we are by definition all equal.
The sad aspect of all this can be found in the way different groups of us seek to deny that essential reality. Progressives are loath to acknowledge this equality when they champion abortion rights. Conservatives do exactly the same thing when they deny the legitimacy of equal opportunity to women and minority groups of all kinds. This emphasis of physical and intellectual differences was modern conservatism's effort to justify its superior mores over the mores of the less fortunate.
Jefferson was determined to establish a society that refused to institutionalize either royalty or to exempt the better born from everyone else's responsibility to expand to future generations what he called "the disease of liberty."
If we really and truly allowed ourselves to follow Mr. Jefferson's historic assertion and Mr. Lincoln's most fundamental belief that ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL, we'd save ourselves a lot of needless pain!
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY