Was Frankenstein Really Uncle Sam? Vol. Viii: Notes on the State of the Declaration of Independence

By Richard J. Rolwing

This is one of eight volumes on the Declaration of Independence. These last four contain only about 25 extended essays each. Rolwing examines nearly all the major writers on our Basic Charter, most of whom repudiate it. He focuses on their manifold criticisms and rejections, reveals their multiple distortions and misunderstandings, rebukes their self-contradictions and inconsistencies, and pities their general theo-phobia. He argues that while America was Founded almost completely by Protestant Christians (the only two deists were not even deists), what was Founded was formally only a philosophical product, not a faith based or Christian one, although the philosophy had been more Catholic than Protestant. Rolwing makes a great deal of American history, law, ethics, politics, philosophy, and theology easily accessible to the average reader. Each 5 minute essay can give you a high for the whole day.

Certainly the Declaration is worth many an hour explaining and defending it. Mr. Rolwing seeks to make the problems brought up about the document capable of being understood by both scholar and ordinary citizen.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 28, 2008
• ISBN: 9781462809905

Richard J. Rolwing

Richard J. Rolwing, a retired theologian, taught philosophy, world religions, Christianity, and politics at small colleges and large universities. He was a supermarket manager, arbitrator, insurance agent, mortgage broker, stockbroker, registered financial planner, and executive VP for several corporations, which drilled oil/gas wells, marketed business equipment internationally, and bought and operated a gold mine in California. He has rehabbed dozens of homes all over his city, spoken before business groups all over his state, and lectured before professional groups all over the nation. He has published four volumes on the philosophy behind the US Constitution. A recent work was Digging Up Darwin in Ohio Without Holding Your Nose.

Book preview

Was Frankenstein

Really Uncle Sam?

Vol. VIII

Notes on the State of the

Declaration of Independence

Richard J. Rolwing

Copyright © 2008 by Richard J. Rolwing.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

1 The Pursuit of Happiness

2 The Right to Free Speech

3 A Book Review

4 Book Review by Michael Potemra

5 A Book Review by Thomas Mackubin

6 Does a Political Community Need Religious Faith?

7 Providence and Intelligent Design

8 Our Embattled Constitution

9 The Right To Property

10 Human Rights and Justice in an Age of Terror

11 A Philosopher

12 The Founders Were Religious

13 The Past is Context

14 Beginning is a Silly Term

15 The Federalist Society

16 The Natural Law

17 The New Atheists

18 Methodological Atheism

19 Immigration

20 Questions

21 Know Nothing

22 What If

23 Friends

24 Faith Needs More than Revelation

25 No Soul (or God)

26 Silence and Speech

27 American Ideals: Founding a Republic of Virtue

28 Relationality

29 Rights

30 Freedom

31 The Genius of Plato

32 Distortion at the National Archives

33 Book Reviews

34 The Legacy of Jihad

35 Las Casas, by Gustavo Gutierrez, 1993

Endnotes

1

The Pursuit of Happiness

What Makes You Happy? was a poll taken in August of 07 of 1300 young people between ages 13 and 24.

The top answer was spending time with family. Next was spending time with friends. Third was spending time with a significant other. No one cited money. Sex decreased happiness for teens age 13 to 17. Whatever happiness sex brought to those 18 to 24 was only momentary.

What is happiness? A college graduate of 23 says just a general stress-free feeling where I’m not really worried about anything. A boy of 17 said, It’s just waking up in the morning and looking forward to what I’m going to be doing that day. A girl of 14 said, Its playing trumpet in my school band. Far more of those who use neither alcohol or drugs are happy with life than those who do. More of those who are religious are happy than those who are not. A psychologist said, Research has shown us that relationships are the single greatest source of happiness.

George Washington connected happiness and virtue. C.S. Lewis once said the pursuit of happiness destroys marriages. In We Have No Right to Happiness Lewis discussed two people who had each divorced so they could marry each other, with each justifying the action by claiming everyone has a right to happiness.

Clare, a neighbor lady who agreed that they had a right to happiness was not claiming a right as a freedom guaranteed by the laws of society. That would be a legal right, but only to remarry, not to be happy. There are no rights to good luck, to be tall, or be rich, or have good weather for a picnic. She meant they had a moral right to so act, presuming a natural law of morality after the style of Aquinas, Grotius, Hooker, and Locke.

Lewis reflects, "I agree with her. I hold this conception to be basic to all civilization. Without it the actual laws of the state become an absolute, as in Hegel. They cannot be criticized because there is no norm against which they should be judged.

"The ancestry of Clare’s maxim, ‘They have a right to happiness’ is august. In words that are cherished by all civilized men, but especially by Americans, it has been laid down that one of the rights of man is a right to ‘the pursuit of happiness.’ And now we get to the real point.

"What did the writers of that august declaration mean? It is quite certain what they did not mean. They did not mean that man was entitled to pursue happiness by any and every means—including, say, murder, rape, robbery, treason and fraud. No society could be built upon such a basis.

"They meant ‘to pursue happiness by all lawful means’; that is, by all means which the Law of Nature eternally sanctions and which the laws of the nation shall sanction.

Admittedly this seems at first to reduce their maxim to the tautology that men (in pursuit of happiness) have a right to do whatever they have a right to do. But tautologies, seen against their proper historical context, are not always barren tautologies. The Declaration is primarily a denial of the political principles which long governed Europe; a challenge flung down to the Austrian and Russian empires, to England before the Reform Bills, to Bourbon France. It demands that whatever means of pursuing happiness are lawful for any should be lawful for all; that man," not men of some particular caste, class, status or religion, should be free to use them. In a century when this is being unsaid by nation after nation and party after party, let us not call it a barren tautology.

But the question as to what means are ‘lawful’—what methods of pursuing happiness are either morally permissible by the Law of Nature or should be declared legally permissible by the legislature of a particular nation—remains exactly where it did. And on that question I disagree with Clare. I don’t think it is obvious that people have the unlimited ‘right to happiness’ which she suggests.¹

But of course a right to pursue some ideal condition is no right to catch it or obtain it or possess it. In fact, happiness is a state of being, a condition or quality which can be enjoyed both in activity and in passivity. Ultimately it can only be the fulfillment of full human potential. George Washington was right in connecting happiness and human virtue. Certainly the Declaration claimed to be exercising virtue in separating the colonists from those it considered to be not practicing virtue. England was wrong and America was doing right to say so and part company with it for that reason.

2

The Right to Free Speech

While a right to free speech is not mentioned in the Declaration, the Constitution’s First Amendment forbids abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press at least by the Federal Congress. It does not affirm that a citizen has a right to freedom of speech and of the press. Rather it denies that the federal government may abridge a pre-existing freedom.

We have not yet addressed this topic as related to the Declaration, but serious scholarship has established that many Federal laws and/or regulations do regulate speech if not abridge it. Morality in Media President Robert Peters has commented in a news release, It ought to go without saying that the First Amendment was never intended to protect every utterance [without limits]. Among other things, the First Amendment does not protect treasonous, fraudulent or libelous statements, inciting a riot, perjury, contempt of court, false advertising, violating copyrights, expressing threats, military insubordination, obscenity, or communication, even possession, of child pornography.² One could add many other things forbidden by law, such as leaking confidential business information or classified governmental information, lying to federal prosecutors, misdirecting police investigations, and now, in the work-place, many kinds of speech that harass others sexually or otherwise.

Freedom of speech, like freedom to pursue happiness, is not, and was never claimed, nor meant, by the Founders to be, absolute and unlimited, nor unlimitable and unregulatable by human positive laws, by government. Even religious exercise is limitable by norms of peaceful social order.

New York Knicks President Isaiah Thomas was tried in a federal court for bullying verbal harassment, mostly sexual, at work. Obscenities and sexual slurs violate laws. That is, unless they occur on cable or satellite TV channels unregulated by law for some reason. Because the Federal Communications Commission rules out vulgarity, profanity, cursing, swearing, obscenities, or expletives on regular broadcast television and radio, the nation’s TV broadcasters have sued the Commission in two federal courts to have the broadcast indecency law declared unconstitutional. They implicitly both appeal to the Declaration’s natural rights and distort them.

Peters comments, If you listen to the broadcasters, you would think that our nation’s founding fathers risked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor so that citizens, whether in the press or in the marketplace, could utter obscenities with impunity, regardless of circumstances.

3

A Book Review

THE LAW’S COMMAND by Richard Bastien, is a review of In Defense of Natural Law (Oxford Univ.) by Robert P. George, a professor at Princeton, former judicial fellow at the Supreme Court, currently a presidential appointee to the Civil Rights Commission, who has sometimes been called one of America"s ‘leading legal and political theorists.’

"People who read this work… may well find it difficult to question his reputation as one of the most brilliant exponents of natural law philosophy and its public policy implications.

"In Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality, published in 1993, George called into question some basic assumptions of liberal jurisprudence and political theory. In his most recent book, he goes one step further and attempts to demonstrate how natural law theory allows for an adequate treatment of basic issues of justice and political morality. More importantly, George provides a well-reasoned argument in support of the notion that one need not adopt the contemporary liberal creed, according to which personal preferences or opinions are the ultimate foundations of what is right or wrong, to establish one’s credentials as a true believer in democracy."³

4

Book Review by Michael Potemra

"Harry Jaffa’s latest book, Storm Over the Constitution, is the work of a man clearly in love with the American idea. In the preface to this slim but fascinating volume, Larry P. Arnn summarizes Jaffa’s central insight this way: ‘We believe that American conservatism has something special to conserve. That something is formed around the Declaration of Independence.’

"The book more than justifies the claim that the Declaration is central to an understanding of American values in general, and of American conservatism in particular. It consists of Jaffa’s controversial essays—aimed chiefly at Judge Robert Bork [whose significant recent mind-changes are not described]—on how, specifically, the values of the Declaration are to be respected in the process of jurisprudence. Are the values expressed in the Declaration to be incorporated into the Constitution and treated as law? Or are they simply too vague, reflecting personal opinions that may be true but are unenforceable in the courts?

"The issue has generated a great deal of debate, and more than a little anger. If you asked the debaters, they would probably say that the value of Jaffa’s book—indeed of his entire body of work—rests entirely on which side is right. This reviewer sides with Jaffa, chiefly on the grounds that 1) the Founding fathers lived in a culture in which the principles of the Declaration were intellectually central, and 2) it is therefore reasonable to take these principles into account when trying to establish the Founder’s original intent. But leaving that question aside, it remains true that Storm Over the Constitution lays out an intellectual banquet. It is an important achievement, even aside from the legal point at issue.

"One learns here, for example, in a very succinct way, about the specific genius of the Constitution, its combination of democracy and restraint, of majority rule and minority rights. Jaffa quotes James Madison as saying that an elected Congress should be allowed to do only those things ‘that could be rightfully done by the unanimous concurrence of the members.’ This distinction goes to the heart of America’s moral order. If a course of action is morally wrong, the fact that 50% plus one of voters, or even 100% of voters, favor it does not make the action right; it merely makes the action possible.

"Madison was saying that right can never reside purely in might. The constitutional safeguards the Founders wrote into their document were intended to limit the power [make it difficult] in the nascent democracy, of might to oppress right. But this mechanism could not be self-enforcing; as its success depended largely on a moral understanding of right, a high level of virtue among the citizenry was essential to its functioning.

"Jaffa believes that this virtue can best be assured by a cultivation—in the process of jurisprudence—of respect for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. While Jaffa’s critics disagree with him on the question of whether these principles of natural morality should be treated as enforceable law, they would agree with him that these principles are nonetheless an essential underpinning of civic order.

"Jaffa also quotes Thomas Jefferson as calling the Declaration of Independence ‘an expression of the American mind.’ Exactly correct. No matter whether the Declaration is a binding expression of our country’s law, it is without doubt the highest expression of its mind. Americans have fought willingly for the freedom of individuals, and for their human rights, not because an act of Congress or a Supreme Court decision commanded them to do so, but because our national character is receptive to certain truths about the human person, truths enunciated by reason as well as Judeo-Christian revelation.

One of the best passages of the book is the author’s discussion of this philosophical basis of human rights. In a section he refers to as ‘Aristotle for lawyers,’ but which could just as well be called ‘Aristotle for laymen,’ Jaffa lays out the specific distinctiveness of humanity—what gives us rights that other animals lack. Human beings, he says, are different because their capacities are not limited to the physical; they can transcend the physical through the process of reason. When Aristotle defines man as a rational animal, he is addressing not merely what makes human beings different from lower animals, but what united human beings into realm of a sacred common value.⁴

5

A Book Review by Thomas Mackubin

A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln

and the Coming of the Civil War by Harry Jaffa

This book is Jaffa’s "long-awaited sequel to his acclaimed study of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Crisis of the House Divided, published in 1958. Jaffa’s illustrious career has been devoted to the intellectual articulation, clarification and defense of the principles of American Founding and their perpetuation by the words and deeds of Abraham Lincoln. Indeed, Mr. Jaffe’s work has played a major role in bringing about the rebirth of natural rights and natural law reasoning in American politics and law in the second half of the 20th century."

"Mr. Jaffa’s Lincoln believed that America’s ‘ancient faith’ was the central idea of equality as articulated by the common sense reading of the Declaration of Independence… Taking issue with the secularity of our time, Mr. Jaffa presents the Declaration of Independence and Lincoln’s understanding of it as the fulfillment of the promise of both classical philosophy and biblical revelation. Mr. Jaffa maintains that it was Lincoln’s conviction that the Declaration of Independence reflected the divine government of the universe, which therefore set the pattern for the moral and legal order of constitutional government.

"If, as Lincoln believed, equality is the basis of republican government, then slavery is an affront to republican government. But how it is possible to reconcile the words of the Declaration with the practice of slavery among some of the Founders themselves? Lincoln argued persuasively that the Founders compromised on slavery out of necessity, not because they thought it right or even because they were hypocrites. Indeed, there is ample evidence that the Founders understood clearly the conflict between slavery and the principles upon which the United States was created.

"Lincoln contended the Founders believed that they had placed the institution of slavery on the road to extinction. But Lincoln had to deal with the growing, if not prevalent, rejection of the common-sense meaning of equality. For example, John Calhoun contended that the proposition that all men are created equal ‘has become the most false and dangerous of all political errors.’ Alexander Stephens [VP of the Confederacy] claimed that the Confederate constitution, the ‘cornerstone of which was the ‘‘great truth’’ of slavery and inequality,’ would correct the fatal error enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.

"Others did not go quite so far, but the effect was the same. In his 1857 Dred Scott decision, Chief Justice Roger Taney held that the Founders could not have meant to include blacks in the Declaration[‘s ‘all men’]. As a result, the black man, whether freedman or slave, had no rights the white man was bound to respect. According to Stephen Douglas’s doctrine of ‘popular sovereignty’, slavery was an issue that should be left to the vote of the white people of a state or territory.

"Lincoln understood the critical importance of public sentiment in a democracy. ‘Our government rests in public opinion… Whoever can change public opinion, can change the government, practically just so much.’ Lincoln was concerned that individuals like Taney and Douglas were preparing public sentiment to accept the transformation of the slavery question from one of ‘hostility to the PRINCIPLE, and toleration, only by necessity’ where the Founders had placed it, to slavery as a ‘sacred right.’ Lincoln knew that if public sentiment in support of equality was undermined, the ‘moral lights’ that supported our ‘ancient faith’ would be extinguished and the possibility of free government would be lost.

Lincoln’s task was not only to restore this ‘ancient faith,’ but also to save the Union from those who would destroy it. The ‘new birth of freedom’ promised by the Gettysburg address could not have occurred if the Union had been split asunder.

The position that secessions had not split the Union asunder presupposes and/or implies that the states who left never got away, that their secessions failed, that their