The Ryan Declaration: Wrong on Rights

“Our rights come from nature and God, not from government. That's who we are. That's how we built this country. That's who we are. That's what made us great. That's our founding,” so declared Congressman Paul Ryan during his first speech as Mitt Romney’s Vice Presidential running mate last week.

However, the Congressman left off a very important follow up probably because it doesn’t suit his political ends. It’s true, the Declaration of Independence does refer in its opening paragraph to the “separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle” us. But evidently that’s where the Congressman, and many conservatives, doze off when reading. In so doing, Mr. Ryan has made a grave error.

The Declaration, immediately following the entitlements from God clause, states:

“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. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” That, Mr. Ryan, is our Founding. That’s what made us great.

He may have to simplify it and leave out inconvenient truths to satisfy his far right political base, but as it turns out the issue of rights in this country is much more complicated than Mr. Ryan would have us believe.

America’s founding fathers, fresh from throwing off their British masters who excelled at the art of using government to oppress people, may well have agreed with Ryan about where rights come from, but they also knew firsthand that rights, regardless of from whom they are derived, are also easily denied. All it takes is a majority, or an army, and the rights of various groups or classes of people are extinguished. The right wing, when they’ve had the honor and duty to govern, has used all the powers of government to do just that.

Mr. Ryan and his Tea Party compatriots don’t believe that government has the authority to convey rights. How would he respond, then, if someone were to ask him if government has the authority to guarantee those rights? Surely under the US Constitution, the federal government has the authority and power to preserve, protect and defend the very rights granted to its citizens by the same document. Would Mr. Ryan agree with that? I’m not so sure.

Perhaps Mr. Ryan would benefit from a little bit of education. As noted above, the Declaration of Independence establishes that all men are created equal. It affirmatively declares, without qualifier or context, that all men “are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.”

The Bill of Rights guarantees 10 enumerated rights, and others that are implied, to all Americans. Those documents were written by the men who founded this nation. I'm quite certain they are the experts when it comes to this stuff. All men are created equal is a pretty definitive statement, and not really open to interpretation. I would add here that “men” is universally understood to mean all men and women, lest Mr. Ryan forget that God granted women rights too.

So when the severely conservative congressman from Wisconsin and newly minted vice presidential candidate says that "our rights come from nature and god, not government," we all should be compelled to ask him why it is the Republican Party has spent the better part of 150 years using government to deny those rights to groups of citizens who don’t look and act like them. 

For most of its existence, the Republican Party has stood against any attempt to guarantee equality to various groups of Americans. Sure, Lincoln freed the slaves. He was one of the better angels of the Republican Party’s nature. But other than the emancipation of the slaves, the Republican Party has literally stood in the doorway against all efforts to ensure that equality is more than just a phrase in a governing document. Mind you, the efforts to guarantee equal rights would not have even been necessary were the full intent of this nation’s founding documents truly implemented.

We wouldn’t have been forced into a bloody civil war in 1860 to free the slaves were it not for Southern conservatives’ refusal to stand by the “all men are created equal” clause. True that many southern conservatives were, at a time in history, democrats. Today, they think the same way, but they’re republicans. That says a lot.

There would have been no need to pass the 15th Amendment to the Constitution granting women the right to vote if we had just stood by the “all men are created equal” clause and recognized that “the laws of nature and nature’s God” granted women the right to vote, but men took that right away.

We wouldn’t have had to pass the Voting Rights Act that gave African Americans the unrestricted right to vote, another right granted by “the laws of nature and nature’s God” and taken away by men.

We wouldn’t have had to pass the Civil Rights Act that outlawed discrimination against ethnic and racial minorities and women if we just recognized that “the laws of nature and nature’s God” granted these people the same rights as all others, but men took those rights away.

And we wouldn’t be having an intense debate in this country about whether gay men and women deserve the same equality of opportunity under the law that every other American citizen enjoys today if we simply stand by the “all men are created equal” clause and recognize that “the laws of nature and nature’s God” grant our fellow LGBT citizens these same equal rights, but men have taken those rights away.

So Mr. Ryan, perhaps you should put down your Bible and stop reading your Catechisms for just a moment and pick up a history book. For decades in this nation, we did not treat all men equally - it never was the universal principle most Americans now believe it should be. For far too long in this country, men like Mr. Ryan have denied to their fellow citizens their God-and-nature-given rights.

In those times in history, it took a strong Federal government to guarantee that the rights conveyed us by the nation’s governing documents were in fact not taken away by men. And today, 224 years later, we still need a strong Federal government to, as Ryan said in his speech in Norfolk on August 11, guarantee equal opportunity to every American.

Because as of this moment in history, some of us, Mr. Ryan, are still waiting.

Let me close by affirming, lest I get accused of sedition, that this is the greatest nation on Earth. But being great doesn’t make us perfect. We’re still forming that more perfect union, because in the eyes of some, after all the progress we’ve made, all men are not treated equally.

Throughout our history, though, when we’ve recognized inequality and intolerance, Americans have corrected it. Because the Declaration gives us that right too… “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” That’s called democracy.

That's who we are. That's what made us great. That's our founding.