lewrockwell.com / By Patrick J. Buchanan / January 26, 2013
“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.
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