All Men Are Created Equal

 

This essay from AP seems to deliberately obscure the plain sense of the simple passage from the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.”

“Those words say to me, ‘Do better, America.’ And what I mean by that is we have never been a country where people were truly equal,” Jennings says. “It’s an aspiration to continue to work towards, and we’re not there yet.”

“We say ‘All men are created equal’ but does that mean we need to make everyone entirely equal at all times…?’”

“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.’”

But if men are created equal, it cannot be the business of government to make them equal. The duty of government is to treat them equally; to value them for their own deeds, as opposed to valuing them for how they were created.

The author then suggests that unless we recognize gay marriage, we are denying gays the right to marry, hence treating them unequally. But we are not—gays always had equal rights to marry; just not to marry men. Is it discriminatory if we still do not allow people to legally marry animals, their grown children, themselves, or multiple partners? No, so long as the same law applies to all for the same act.

Nor is there any question that the term “all men” always referred to black men. There is no way to twist it so that it does not. 

I fear this essay is an example of the postmodern spirit, which insists that we can twist words to mean whatever we want, making them endlessly debatable, and, ultimately, meaningless.

The essay concludes with Ibram Kendi explaining “The anti-racist idea suggests that all racial groups are biologically, inherently equal.”

This is self-evidently false. Racial groups are not biologically equal, because they are not biologically identical. It is the human soul that is equal; in moral worth, because equal in the eyes of the Creator. Not everyone has the mental or physical capacity to be a doctor, or a star athlete, and it is not discrimination if you are not. One gets into these confusions when one gets materialist, and denies the soul of man.

Kendi of course goes further, and insists that all cultures must also be accepted as equal. This is nonsensical. A culture is a set of ideas; this is tantamount to insisting that all ideas are equally true.

Including things like apartheid, genocide, caste, and child sacrifice.