americans first
- added November 6, 2007
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- JD5DAD
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Jefferson may have said that but he didn't mean it.
He owned slaves. He didn't want women, blacks or indians to have the same rights he had.
He would be slammed as a first rate hypocrite in today's political environment and for good reasons. -
Like all of us, Jefferson was subject to the time and social environment into which he was born. During the years before the civil war, there was no difference between a white person of the South and a white person of the North- save circustance. Those in the South were born into a mindset that saw black slaves as property, those in the North were born into a mindset that saw blacks as free, without the right to vote or earn equal wages to whites. Had a white person in the North been born into a slaveholding family in the South, he or she would have grown up to be a slaveholder. Had a white person in the South been born to the North, he or she would have held the views of that region.
What Jefferson wrote laid the groundwork for Lincoln to hold the Union together during the Civil War. The Declaration of Independence did not literally mean that all people are created equal. This is not possible. There are so many varieties of humans. The tall, the short, the fat, the skinny, the muscular, the old, the young, the wealthy, the poor, the diabetic, the black, the yellow, the white. Equality is in opportunity. Any person in this country is able to work, to earn a wage, to marry, to have a family. This is the ideal. And clearly, we still have not honored the ideal set up in the Declaration of Independence. Gay people deserve the right to marry, as anyone else. And gay people are guaranteed the right to marry in the Declaration of Independence, in the Constitution of the United States. To deny the marriage between homosexuals is to set one group of people as superior to another group. And to set one group of people above another group of people is the foundation for despotism, for serfdom, for the monarchy that we fought to overturn in the American Revolution. When we recognize all as equals in opportunity, we come closer to the ideals of a democracy.
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