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THE ASTORIAN • TuESdAy, July 5, 2022
The long debate over ‘All men are created equal’
The words are
invoked often
By HILLEL ITALIE
Associated Press
NEW YORK — Kevin
Jennings is CEO of the
Lambda Legal organiza-
tion, a prominent advocate
for LGBTQ rights. He sees
his mission in part as fulfill-
ing that hallowed American
principle: “All men are cre-
ated equal.”
“Those words say to me,
‘Do better, America.’ And
what I mean by that is we
have never been a coun-
try where people were truly
equal,” Jennings says. “It’s
an aspiration to continue to
work towards, and we’re not
there yet.”
Ryan T. Anderson is
president of the conserva-
tive Ethics and Public Pol-
icy Center. He, too, believes
that “all men are created
equal.” For him, the words
mean we all have “the same
dignity, we all count equally,
no one is disposable, no one
a second-class citizen.” At
the same time, he says, not
everyone has an equal right
to marry — what he and
other conservatives regard
as the legal union of a man
and woman.
“I don’t think human
equality requires redefining
what marriage is,” he says.
Few words in Ameri-
can history are invoked as
often as those from the pre-
amble to the Declaration of
Independence, published
nearly 250 years ago. And
few are more difficult to
define. The music, and
the economy, of “all men
are created equal” make it
both universal and elusive,
adaptable to viewpoints —
social, racial, economic —
otherwise with little or no
common ground.
How we use them often
depends less on how we
came into this world than on
what kind world we want to
live in.
It’s as if “All men are cre-
ated equal” leads us to ask:
“And then what?”
“We say ‘All men are
created equal’ but does
that mean we need to make
everyone entirely equal at all
times, or does it mean every-
one gets a fair shot?” says
Michael Waldman, presi-
dent of the Brennan Center
for Justice, which promotes
expanded voting rights,
public financing of polit-
ical campaigns and other
progressive causes. “Indi-
vidualism is baked into that
phrase, but also a broader,
more egalitarian vision.
There’s a lot there.”
Associated Press
This undated engraving shows the scene on July 4, 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was approved by the Continental Congress in Philadelphia.
Date back centuries
Thomas Jefferson helped
immortalize the expres-
sion, but he didn’t invent
it. The words in some form
date back centuries before
the Declaration of Indepen-
dence and were even pre-
ceded in 1776 by Virgin-
ia’s Declaration of Rights,
which stated that “all men
are by nature equally free
and independent.”
Peter Onuf, a profes-
sor emeritus at the Uni-
versity of Virginia whose
books include “The Mind
of Thomas Jefferson,” notes
that Jefferson himself did not
claim to have said something
radically new and wrote
in 1825 that the Declara-
tion of Independence lacked
“originality of principle or
sentiment.”
The declaration was an
indictment of the British
monarchy, but not a state-
ment of justice for all. For
the slave owning Jeffer-
son “and most of his fellow
patriots, enslaved people
were property and therefore
not included in these new
polities, leaving their sta-
tus unchanged,” Onuf says.
He added that “did not mean
he did not recognize his
enslaved people to be peo-
ple, just that they could only
enjoy those universal, nat-
ural rights elsewhere, in a
country of their own: eman-
cipation and expatriation.”
Hannah Spahn, a profes-
sor at the John F. Kennedy
Institute in Berlin and author
of the upcoming “Black Rea-
son, White Feeling: The Jef-
fersonian Enlightenment in
the African American Tradi-
tion,” says that a draft ver-
sion of the declaration made
clear that Jefferson meant
“all humans” were created
equal but not necessarily that
that all humans were equal
under the law. Spahn, like
such leading Revolutionary
War scholars as Jack Rak-
ove, believes that “all men
are created equal” origi-
nally referred less to indi-
vidual equality than to the
rights of a people as a whole
to self-government.
Once the declaration
had been issued, percep-
tions began to change. Black
Americans were among the
first to change them, notably
the New England-based cler-
gyman Lemuel Haynes. Soon
after July 4, Haynes wrote
“Liberty Further Extended:
Or Free Thoughts on the Ille-
gality of Slave-Keeping,”
an essay not published until
1983 but seen as reflecting
the feelings of many in the
Black community, with its
call to “affirm, that even an
African, has equally as good
a right to his liberty in com-
mon with Englishmen.”
Spahn finds Haynes’
response “philosophically
innovative,” because he iso-
lated the passage containing
the famous phrase from the
rest of the declaration and
made it express “timeless,
universally binding norms.”
“He deliberately down-
played Jefferson’s original
emphasis on problems of
collective assent and con-
sent,” she says.
Endlessly adapted
The words have since
been endlessly adapted and
reinterpreted. By feminists at
the Seneca Falls Convention
of 1848 who stated, “We hold
these truths to be self-evi-
dent; that all men and women
are created equal.” By civil
rights leaders from Frederick
Douglass to the Rev. Mar-
tin Luther King Jr., who in
his “I Have a Dream” speech
held up the phrase as a sacred
promise to Black Americans.
By Abraham Lincoln, who
invoked them in the Gettys-
burg Address and elsewhere,
but with a narrower scope
than what King imagined a
century later.
In Lincoln’s time, accord-
ing to historian Eric Foner,
“they made a careful distinc-
tion between natural, civil,
political and social rights.
One could enjoy equality in
one but not another.”
“Lincoln spoke of equal-
ity in natural rights — life,
liberty and the pursuit of
happiness,” says Foner,
whose books include the
Pulitzer Prize winning, “The
Fiery Trial: Abraham Lin-
coln and American Slav-
ery.” “That’s why slavery is
wrong and why people have
an equal right to the fruits of
their labor. Political rights
were determined by the
majority and could be lim-
ited by them.”
The words have been
denied entirely. John C.
Calhoun, the South Caro-
lina senator and vehement
defender of slavery, found
“not a word of truth” in them
as he attacked the phrase
during a speech in 1848.
Vice President Alexander
H. Stephens, of the Confed-
erate States, contended in
1861 that “the great truth”
is “the negro is not equal to
the white man; that slavery
subordination to the superior
race is his natural and normal
condition.”
The overturning of Roe v.
Wade and other recent U.S.
Supreme Court decisions has
led some activists to won-
der if “All men are created
equal” still has any mean-
ing. Robin Marty, author of
“Handbook for a Post-Roe
America,” calls the phrase
a “bromide” for those “who
ignore how unequal our lives
truly are.”
Marty added that the
upending of abortion rights
has given the unborn “greater
protection than most,” a con-
tention echoed in part by Roe
opponents who have said
that “All men are created
equal” includes the unborn.
Applied to
different ends
Among
contemporary
politicians and other public
figures, the words are applied
to very different ends.
• President Donald Trump
cited them in October 2020
(“The divine truth our found-
ers enshrined in the fabric of
our nation: that all people are
created equal”) in a statement
forbidding federal agencies
from teaching critical race
theory. President Joe Biden
echoed the language of Sen-
eca Falls (“We hold these
truths to be self-evident, that
all men and women are cre-
ated equal”) while praising
labor unions last month as he
addressed an AFL-CIO gath-
ering in Philadelphia.
• Morse Tan, the dean of
Liberty University, the evan-
gelical school co-founded
by the Rev. Jerry Falwell
Sr., says the words uphold
a “classic, longstanding”
Judeo-Christian
notion:
“The irreducible worth and
value that all human beings
have because they (are) cre-
ated in the image of God.”
Secular humanists note Jef-
ferson’s own religious skep-
ticism and fit his words and
worldview within 18th cen-
tury Enlightenment thinking,
emphasizing human reason
over faith.
• Conservative orga-
nizations from the Clare-
mont Institute to the Heritage
Foundation regard “all men
are created equal” as proof
that affirmative action and
other government programs
addressing racism are unnec-
essary and contrary to the
ideal of a “colorblind” system.
Ibram X. Kendi, the
award-winning author and
director of the Center for
Antiracist Research at Bos-
ton University, says the
words can serve what he calls
both “antiracist” and “assim-
ilationist” perspectives.
“The anti-racist idea sug-
gests that all racial groups
are biologically, inher-
ently equal. The assimila-
tionist idea is that all racial
groups are created equal,
but it leaves open the idea
some racial groups become
inferior by nurture, mean-
ing some racial groups are
inferior culturally or behav-
iorally,” says Kendi, whose
books include ”Stamped
from the Beginning” and
“How to Be an Antiracist.”
“To be an anti-racist is to
recognize that it’s not just
that we are created equal, or
biologically equal. It’s that
all racial groups are equals.
And if there are disparities
between those equal racial
groups, then it is the result of
racist policy or structural rac-
ism and not the inferiority or
superiority of a racial group.”