The Declaration of Independence is about the right of a collective people to declare independence from a government they see as no longer representing their interests.I have a similar beef with misunderstandings about "all men are created equal" -- the point wasn't that every man (and, yes, Howiedoody Zinn, that includes women) is equal (key word leftists miss is "created") but that a king, too, is created equal (key word "all"). It justified separation from the King by denying divine rule, something that the great John Milton had affirmed a hundred years earlier in his argument that kings serve only at the consent of the people.
This is an interpretation which I had never before considered. I can see the point philosophically, but I find it difficult to believe that the people of that time period would have embraced it. In their culture, the King was effectively put into power by God, and I think it would probably take a generation or two not living under the "divine right of kings" to began to see the King as an "equal" to an ordinary man. Even today people don't see a King as equal, because so many are infatuated with Royalty and look on it admiringly.
Still, I get that "All men are created equal" is a core statement of a free and democratic people, so its meaning far exceeds its logical purpose in the Declaration.
It came to mean such, but at the time they sent it to England, so far as they were concerned it only meant that *they* were equal. Like a selfish child, their primary concern was for themselves, even though they were hypocritically denying this equality for others.