The fireworks and cookouts celebrate the Declaration of Independence, especially its opening paragraph before the unending list of British governmental issues. Lincoln made constant reference to the Declaration of Independence. Its sentence on equality was his touchstone for the wrong of slavery. It was to the Declaration his four score and seven pointed in the Gettysburg Address. Over time, equality was a reference point for the American experience.
I have puzzled over the meaning of all being created equal in the Declaration for a long time. Richard Brown examines different sectors of society, as they struggled to come to grips with the extent of equality in his book, Self-Evident Truths. (Again, Lincoln recalled from Euclid’s set of proofs “things equal to the same thing are equal to each other.” Lincoln noted that Euclid called this self-evident.
In religion, at the national level, obviously we have the “wall of separation” in the religious exercise and no establishment clause of the first amendment. Such was not the case at the state level. Bu it by bit states removed support for a particular state religion by 1833. No new state attempted to support a particular religious organization. In the Revolutionary period, mobs drove Baptists out of town in Massachusetts. Non-Protestants could not hold public office. New York denied basic citizenship rights to immigrant Catholics, and Catholics did not hold office there until 1802.
Prof. Brown has a brilliant idea on equality and class by examining criminal cases. Basically, the system discriminated in homicide cases. A upper class person was rarely convicted and sentenced for a the crime against a lower class person. Even-handed justice was sought especially when both parties were from the upper crust. On the other hand, it was considered that a gentleman should be given every benefit of the doubt if the victim would be from the lower class. In a New York trial, a jury was told that a murder should be reduced to manslaughter as a tenant spoke to the employer as an equal, not with the deference due a person of station.
Equality is an aspiration for many. Its realization is under assault in the public sphere. We have made enormous advances, but many are troubled by the widening gulf of inequality between the haves and have nots. We do not hear about equality of opportunity very much in our time. Almost daily, we hear the rich lauded and the poor put down. Somehow the radical shift in the Republican party has convinced people that the rich are vulnerable and need all sorts of aid.
When I was a young adult, I recall working with John Rawls notion of justice as fairness. “The first part, fair equality of opportunity, requires that citizens with the same talents and willingness to use them have the same educational and economic opportunities regardless of whether they were born rich or poor. In all parts of society there are to be roughly the same prospects of culture and achievement for those similarly motivated and endowed” Rawls was well aware of differences in individuals, but he was also well-aware that social norms, procedures, and structures benefit some and hamper others.
Scripture tells us that God shows no partiality (Acts 10, Rom. 2). Wilson Carey McWilliams spoke of the Bible as a second voice in American politics. Along with individual rights, he heard in the Bible a call for equality, of community, of friendship, of what we hold in common and what can hold dear together. July 4th reminds us of a our national roots in equality, not only economic, but political and social as well. To be children of God is to realize our common bonds, of respecting each other in that same light.
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