The American Creed and Universal Human Rights:
Where can we turn, in our American traditions, for moral
grounding and orientation in response to those who insist on the endless
accumulation of wealth, power and privilege?
The answer is clear:
we are being called, as never before, to return to our founding
principles embodied in the American Creed.
When the Founders declared independence, they were
strongly influenced by a key concept of the European Enlightenment: the belief that human rights were
universal, transcending the law, and that the law's purpose ought to be to
uphold these rights. Thus when Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of
Independence in 1776, he declared:
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.
This sentence transformed the Declaration from simply being
a list of grievances against King George III into a famous proclamation of
human rights. It has since become
known as the American Creed, and conveys the core belief and moral value upon
which our democracy is based.
The Declaration was one of the most amazing acts in human
history, representing a quantum leap to an entirely different way of valuing
one another. No country had been founded on such a basis, and the implications
reverberated throughout the world.
The American Creed was not a perfect declaration of human
rights since it specifies "men" and not "people." Furthermore, as the young country began to form, it became
clear that, for the most part, "men" referred to white Anglo-Saxon
Protestants. This contradiction
between the "universality" of human rights, and the actual implementation of
them, is one that America has struggled with for 236 years. Nevertheless, flaws
notwithstanding, this was the first such declaration of universal human
rights. It heralded a radical
break from traditional, top-down power structures, i.e., the monarchies that
ruled Europe.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
