a) a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires (i.e. consider obligatory) that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.
b) Whenever (another conditional) any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends (i.e.the Ends being the previously stated securing of unalienable rights). But not to be changed for light and transient Causes.
c) They can right themselves (again referring to the previously stated securing of unalienable rights. Right themselves meaning the better securing of unalienable rights) by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed.
This argument is essentially the protection of natural right require separation.
You have argued that the converse (Separation requires a protection of natural rights) as premise is a bootless assertion. By which I assume you mean it is false. This is the argument of Marxists such as Lenin and Mao who premised there revolution on (inter alia) the denial of the right to own property; or the Taliban who intend to compel allegiance to their version of the Koran.
that secession as a right cannot be exercised in order to deny natural rights to others.
The DOI was a political statement not a mathematical treatise. There is no need to specify the truth of the converse, especially when the assertion that one has a natural right to deny the natural rights of others is so absurd (i.e. Inconsistent with reason or logic or common sense) I've made the argument that separation is a natural right but that it is conditional. The conditions are those that I've listed from the DOI.
I've also argued that slavery was the primary reason for southern secession. For which I've submitted secession resolutions from South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi and a speech in favor of the Alabama secession resolution.
Therefore I've argued that the DOI cannot properly be used is support of southern secession contra to the original article of this thread.
As Rustbucket noted Jefferson's original draft included the phrase:
He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.
This is why I contend that Jefferson v. Lincoln is a false choice.
Even so, having said nothing in regards to the action taken by Lincoln, I've been branded a Lincoln worshiping yankee abortion loving obama supporter, who thinks all southerners are redneck hicks or some such nonsense. I guess the fact that my father, grandfather, great grandfather (confederate soldier and POW) great great grandfather (confederate soldier and POW) farmed cotton (with slaves) on the same piece of dirt in Monroe N.C. makes my sins worse.
Ok true, your point is?
Bootless means not cogent, or it may mean that the idea doesn't parse: the freedom of fish to breathe nitrous oxide and get silly, something like that.
This is the argument of Marxists such as Lenin and Mao who premised there revolution on (inter alia) the denial of the right to own property; or the Taliban who intend to compel allegiance to their version of the Koran.
Aside from the fact that occasionally Marxists have been known to tell time correctly, what exactly does this have to do with anything, other than an attempt to lodge an argumentum ad hominem by means of "bracketing" me with Marxists and Taliban?
If Marxist revolutionaries premised their revolution on a proposition such as the renunciation of private property, then was that the real premise, or was it a tool for achieving the real goal in view, i.e. human happiness? Their program may or may not be productive of same, but after some sort of trial of their ideas as by the New Harmony experiment or the Paris Commune, one can form an opinion of its likelihood to produce the desired end.
I think you've loaded your argument with too much freight, frankly. Happiness doesn't necessarily consist of being a scold from Massachusetts who, as in the letter just cited, goes sword in hand to plunder another part of the country and burn and slay whatever he cannot profitably carry away.
That's a substantial part of my take on the Civil War, and I argue that people like Non-Sequitur who live to gloat over that historical abuse because they don't like the South and Southerners and wish that all those ills could be visited on the South again, are part of the damage to the larger community that needs to be rectified -- such as by their hygienic quarantining, or removal from polite society and permanent exile to some savage society that still practices on newcomers what Massachusetts soldiers --as in the passage cited above -- practiced on Georgians and Carolinians.
That done, the historical damage inflicted on the American idea and American exceptionalism because their side prevailed needs also to be repaired: all those Supreme Court decisions that turned the Commerce Clause into an all-purpose handle for expanding Congress's warrant into a claim of totalitarian omnipotence and omnicompetence, for example.
By the way, the protection of the property rights of American loyalists (Tories) provided for in the Treaty of Paris did not necessarily make the Tories whole. I would invoke that experience as probative of my statement. The separation of America and Great Britain did not provide fully for the property rights of either Americans or Loyalists, as both sides continued to have "issues" for years after the conclusion of the peace treaty.
Which treaty, by the way, fell under some suspicion in 1812, when the British came calling again.
I thought I had controverted that idea, by pointing out that both ratification and un-ratification, i.e. secession, are within the sovereign power of the People.
As for "light and transient causes", nobody was concerned about that with respect to ratification by the 13 original States.
Washington, Madison, Franklin, and others all inveighed against "disunion" as a political posture: it was unwise, in the face of continuing European interest in North America, for the States, any or all of them, to have gone it alone. That is a political proposition just like the Declaration, but as we have argued exhaustively but apparently to no effect on people prepared to resist elenchus, the idea of a threshold consent to irrevocable Union was not enshrined in the Constitution, and in fact it was explicitly rejected, as shown by our friend.
Not only was nonsecession language rejected in the Philadelphia convention, but likewise amalgamation was rejected, as shown in convention notes brought in by our friend 4CJ years ago, in which the idea of submitting the Constitution to a mass, 13-State ratification convention or plebiscite was proposed but failed to attract a second.
That silence should deafen us today and remind us who The People really are -- the People of the several States, not a lumpen mass that the big-state lawyers have always wanted, to enable their political games further. Games they've been playing, by the way, since Hamilton walked into the hall in Philadelphia.
Lastly, in case anyone wasn't paying attention, the Antifederalists successfully impetrated the addition of the Ninth and Tenth Amendments that explicitly stated what Hamilton insisted would always be understood to be implicit in the Constitution, that powers not delegated to the Union and the federal government, would be reserved to the States, or to the People.
Unmaking of the Union and of the Constitution was one of those reserved powers. It still is.
All the arguments about legal secession or secession at discretion, are just Yankee lawyer-talk. What it really means is, "our political combination to take the federal government into permanent receivership is almost ready -- and you are not going to get away! You will be our meat and drink, and we will kill you if you resist our asset-stripping! Not exactly the sort of proposition most of the Framers had in mind (Hamilton probably did, he was repping for the other New York City businessmen), but it's been the debased basis of our Republic ever since the Civil War.