Declaration of Independence Part 1: Intro and Preamble

Well, I’ve been threatening to write this for months now…

A while ago, I was listening to Mark Levin’s radio show, and he was starting to hype his dad’s book about the Battle of Trenton. That got me to thinking about the Declaration of Independence, since he doesn’t shut up about the Founders. Like I do (alright, want to start doing), I decided to go through the Declaration point-by-point to see if it’s still relevant (or even accurate) today. The timing is almost coincidental, coming during and slightly after the week of July 4, 2013.

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, 

Let’s start right there. “One people” refers to the colonists, and “another” refers to Britain, of course. There was and always will be debate over whether it was actually necessary to break from the Crown (I feel that Parliament did make a massive power grab that was virtually unenforceable, due to distance if nothing else). However, some people today believe that we need to dissolve the current system, believing that it has become too much like the old aristocracies of Europe. This is a compelling argument, especially considering the problems that candidates have with getting ballot access, and the sheer amount of biased money in the system from corporate and union donors.

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.

This established the idea that the United Colonies could be an equal force to Britain, and that the American citizen should be treated the same as the British subject. This second part was a main point of the response to the so-called “Intolerable Acts” (which attempted to make colonists pay their actions against the Crown (especially the Boston Tea Party), which was itself a response to Parliament’s attempt to make the colonies pay for their own defense (which necessarily cost more per capita than that of the Home Islands)). That response also demanded equal voting representation in Parliament (which, as anyone with a fourth-grade understanding of the subject knows, didn’t exist for the colonies, and wasn’t granted). 

In the United States, the national myth is that each citizen is on an equal station with each other, and that our ideals (beginning with this document) place this nation above all of the others. The question is: are the various American citizens even on an equal footing with each other, in any way? Also, should we be above any other nation?