The Spirit of the Declaration Will Prevail

July 4th 2010 has now passed into the history books, but we wonder if the history books will someday mark that date as more than just the 234th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Democrat and other left-wing strategist and apologists will spin themselves into oblivion trying to deny this fact, but it’s true: the American people were defrauded by Barack Obama in the election of 2008. He just flat out isn’t who he portrayed himself to be, and the American people know it. Obama’s antagonism toward the America that we celebrate on the Fourth of July is stirring a repulsion toward him and a rebellion against the lockstep Democrats who are enabling his radical, unendorsed agenda.

We’d guess that Fourth of July celebrations in 2010 have drawn more attention to the Declaration of Independence than in any year since the 1940’s. Though large portions of several generations of Americans have suffered an abysmal education in American history, it is always possible to do a great deal of catch up just by focusing on these words:

"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…”

Those words resonate today, just as they did in 1776, just as they always will. They are as advertised: self-evident truths. They make it impossible to ignore the Creator; they declare it to be impossible for God-given rights to be taken away by human government; and they spell out God-given rights to freedom that will forever put the lie to the ever-recurring, ever-repackaged enticements of would-be tyrants to revoke that freedom under God in the name of utterly phony human government promises of health or security or social justice or fairness.

Courtesy of Rich Lowry in National Review, we were reminded that Abraham Lincoln once said:

“I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.”

Abraham Lincoln had a moral and leadership stature that few politicians have ever approached. Yet the quote above suggests that the essence of his decision-making as a leader was simply to feel and acknowledge the immortal (read: true) sentiment of the Declaration of Independence.

Not many of our current elected officials feel and acknowledge that sentiment genuinely, but a large and growing majority of Americans do. Some of them, like Allen West and Ilario Pantano, are going run for elected office to replace the aristocrats (people like Lindsey Graham). Others will make speeches, attend tea parties, donate to campaigns, write letters, emails and columns—and many will just pray. But their cumulative impact in 2010, 2012 and beyond will send historians looking for new ways to describe a ‘political tsunami’.

Politicians come and go. Truth stays. Truth is always under attack, sometimes overtly, sometimes covertly. It is sometimes obscured and distorted and may even seem to some to be lost. But it can’t be. We just have to wake up to it, claim it, practice it in our own lives, and refuse to be intimidated by lies, no matter who tells them or how many times they are told.

Americans all over this nation are awake, and they are answering the call to defend the spirit of the Declaration of Independence. The origin of that spirit is actually from spirit with a capital “S”—one of the Bible’s names for God. Which is why it will prevail.

Paul Gable

July 5, 2010