Posted on 05/10/2026 12:39:26 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
Think of the Declaration of Independence as the nation’s report card. How well do we live up to it?
The Declaration of Independence is a short document, not much longer than this essay. Even so, it contains three ideas that shocked the world in 1776: Each of us is born equal; God grants us all inviolable rights, including the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; and “We the People” have the right to govern ourselves.
Those three ideas represent America’s creed. When Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration in rooms he rented from a Philadelphia bricklayer, few in Europe believed in them. More than that, many considered them a threat to the existing social and political order. But to the patriots who fought in the long and brutal years of the American Revolution, those three ideas were worth the sacrifice of “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”
The Declaration’s three great ideas still speak to us. Really, the Declaration serves as our nation’s report card. At any point in history, the American people can assess how well we are living up to the Declaration’s promises—and what challenges remain. In 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her colleagues at Seneca Falls, N.Y., reminded the American people that men and women are created equal. Years later, Abraham Lincoln called on the country to live up to the Declaration’s promises in the face of slavery, secession, and a bloody Civil War. Martin Luther King Jr.—standing before the Lincoln Memorial in 1963—challenged Jim Crow and called on the country to redeem the Declaration’s “promissory note” for all Americans. Our nation will always be a work in progress, but the Declaration stands as a constant reminder of who we aspire to be.
Nor should our nation’s imperfections blind us to the tremendous inheritance...
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
Imperfect People ->
God - Divine Providence ->
More Perfect Union
I would love to read the whole article, but WSJ is a paywall. For the sake of the majority of us FReepers who don’t pay for subscriptions to every bloody website that somebody wants to post from, could you also provide a link that gets around the pay wall?
Thanks in advance
A simple thank you for posting Neil Gorsuch’s essay.
THis link should skip the paywall
You called?
That would be a violation of the FR consent decree.
Thank you for your attention to this matter, and check your email.
You just violated the FR consent decree.
“You just violated the FR consent decree. “
??????
!!!!!
FR was sued for copyright infringment posting articles and the compromise was 300 word excerpts and no links that bypassed paywalls.
Check your email.
As a paid subscriber to WSJ they gift links of some items to us, for us to pass on to friends. As it is with WSJ consent we do that we violate NO consent decree FreeRep made with WSJ.
That consent decree was posited on the UNAUTHORIZED sharing of full WSJ articles, in a cut and paste manner.
When we use a WSJ authorized “gift” link - made for sharing, it violates NOTHING.....
You’ll see if you look carefully such gift links from WSJ have elements in them not found in a regular link to the same piece.
And why does WSJ do that?? It gets friends of their paid subscribers to their web pages, and that brings such people to possibly notice ads on their pages, and maybe even consider a subscription.
Never knew that. Thanks for the information.
Never knew that. Thanks for the information.
“Think of the Declaration of Independence as the nation’s report card. How well do we live up to it?”
The phrase “In order to form a more perfect Union” does not appear in the Declaration of Independence.
It’s in the Preamble to the Constitution, 13 years later. Do the WSJ writers not know this?
Moreover the phrase “more perfect Union” has nothing at all to do with morality, God’s approval, or anything like it.
It’s a reference to the “imperfect Union” that the United States had been struggling under since becoming independent and governing ourselves with the Articles of Confederation.
The signers of the Constitution were justifying why they had ditched the Articles (apparently without any legal power to do exactly that) and had reorganized the entire national government structure with the Constitution.
They had “perfected”, as in “refined” or “improved”, a federal governing structure that they believed had too many defects under the Articles.
George Mason and Patrick Henry were two of the numerous Founders who didn’t like this move, believing that the Constitution would end up granting far too much power to the centralized, national government. Some might think that view turned out to be prophetic.
Correct. “Perfect Union” has absolutely nothing to do with morality and ideals. It was written into the preamble of our constitution to address the more contentious, weak and unworkable agreement... the failed and first union established under the previous “Articles of Confederation.”
The meaning of these words describe the newly proposed Constitution as a better contract/framework, or national plan, between the several states penned during the Constitution Debates of 1787.
The constitution would replace the previous failed union of the states contract, The Articles of Confederation (a non-centralized anti-federal loose union) with a pro-Federal union (centralized bound union).
The words in correct context...
“We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union... do ordained and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
That’s it, plain and simple... the more perfect Union refers only to the contract it replaced in order to satisfy the concerns of the anti-federal states.
You will find the meaning of the full preamble in the transcripts from the “Constitution debates of 1787.
Thanks, that worked and very good piece!
It’s important you point that out.
Gorsuch’s sophomoric happy talk shows he’s a lightweight with no historical context.
Maybe we should have a requirement for Justices that they have ancestry from the Revolution…or at least a serious background in American history.
Or both.
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