12/2/2023 0 Comments All men are born equalDemography is destiny, and young Americans overwhelmingly favor gay marriage.Ĭonservatives can slow down the march to freedom, but the big victory for gay marriage in New York State should show religious extremists they can’t stop the movement that Jefferson started with the Declaration of Independence. A majority of Americans now favor gay marriage and support will continue to grow. However the Supreme Court rules, gays, like blacks and women, will eventually bask in the sunlight of equality. If the Court does rule that the California law is a violation of the equal protection clause as a lower federal court already has, thousands of gay couples in the Golden State will join the ranks of same sex couples who now can legally marry in New York, Iowa, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire. Equal protection should equal marriage equality. In the near future, the Supreme Court will rule on the constitutionally of the California prohibition against marriage equality. States can’t favor men over women, whites over blacks, or heterosexuals over gays. The equal protection clause in the 14th Amendment means that states must treat all their citizens equally. The next wave of freedom will extend the American Dream to gay and lesbian Americans. The wave of freedom started with blacks in 1868 then moved on to women through the 19th Amendment ratified in 1920. The 14th Amendment says, "Nor shall any state … deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." Jefferson’s ideals and Lincoln’s hopes were embodied in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which became effective in 1868. In the Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln echoed Jefferson’s words when he said "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." The agony of the Civil War advanced the cause of political equality. "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal." Those words did not free the slaves, but they started a movement toward equal rights for all Americans. The Fourth celebrates the ratification of the Declaration of Independence, which contains these words. They were moved to act.When you celebrated the Fourth of July yesterday, you recognized the right of gays and lesbians to get married like any other American. Even acknowledging all of that, we cannot ignore the transformative and bold words Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence: that it is “self-evident” that “all men are created equal.” Many people, enslaved and free, black and white, believed those words believed they expressed their long-held intuitions and condemned the wrongness of the oppression they suffered. He also questioned the equal intellectual capacity of black people, and he never really contemplated the equality of women on terms satisfactory to us today. Even though he produced eloquent denunciations of slavery, and he saw himself as a progressive on the question, he has been faulted for not working as hard for the freedom of African Americans as he did for that of white colonists. Native peoples could be, but only if they agreed to assimilate with white people. Neither the enslaved nor women were part of it. Jefferson’s vision of equality was not all-inclusive. Ordinary people would have a say in how their government was to be constituted. The Declaration of the French Revolution made in 1791 on the Rights of Man and the Citizen also states: All men are born free and with equal rights, and must always remain free and have equal rights. If there was to be an aristocracy, it would be one of talent, not birth. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free. There would be no assumption that a given class of people was born to rule. He began to think of different ways of ordering society. All Men are Not Created Equal Since the beginnings of our nations it has been implied that all people should be viewed as equals but the question is. As the crisis with Britain flared up, Jefferson questioned the power of the church (preferring the primacy of science and reason), as well as laws that entrenched the power of great families (entail and primogeniture) and the morality of slavery. Yet, as a young man inspired by the books he read that introduced him to the Enlightenment, Jefferson began the process of questioning these hierarchies and status-based power.
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