DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE/BILL OF DIVORCEMENT:
The Essay “They” Don’t Want You To Read
Everybody knows the money phrase from the Declaration of Independence.
But how many understand that the Declaration is actually a bill of divorce from the leaders of the Continental Congress to the English King and his government in Parliament?
Americans learn about the Declaration’s quotably glorious sentiments at school but probably never learn about the bill of particulars that follows. But just as the sentiments above are timeless, the structure of the list that follows only needs slight updating to fit today’s mood among those who vote for a party other than the Republicans.
Here is Declaration 2:0, a Bill of Divorcement, with language from the original Declaration in bold face (and links to the particulars to prove their truth). It starts with the original’s first paragraph:
“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
Declaration 2:0 continues:
The history of the present Republican Party and its millions of adherents is “a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny” in the United States. The Republican faction has failed to act in a way that demonstrates it accepts that all people are created equal and endowed by whatever force rules nature to a basic right to live in liberty and pursue happiness. They have attempted to impose their will by anti-democratic means.
“To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.”
The Republican Party has treated with America’s enemies to win the White House leading to the deaths of tens of thousands of American soldiers and re-empowerment of its greatest rival.
The Party’s elected representatives have upended existing Constitutional customs and defamed the design of the Founding Fathers by refusing to cooperate with anyone not of the Republican faction. The design of the founders was a constitutional order that provided a mechanism for balancing competing factions and power bases. Without respect for these rules the system cannot work. The result is the United States has, over the last quarter of a century, become ungovernable.
Republicans in Congress have publicly attested their intentions to ruin the presidency of any Democrat elected to that office. To achieve this aim they have consistently thwarted the will of the people by refusing to work constructively with any Democrat elected to that high office.
It “has made Judges dependent on its Will alone, for the tenure of their offices,” and refused to allow any party but itself to appoint Justices to the Supreme Court.
It has spent decades trying to “abolish our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our state Governments” via gerrymandering.
The Party has “excited domestic insurrections amongst us,” by normalizing belligerent, unbrotherly discourse that encourages violence by their faction against all others, particularly those who are not white or who are immigrants.
The present Republican President is trying to “cut off our Trade” with all parts of the world.
He is endeavouring to “prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither.”
He is attempting to cut taxes for the wealthiest without the consent of the majority.
Finally, Republicans have perpetuated fraud on the American people by insisting they are the Party of Lincoln when their policies and ideology are the modern evolution of those of the Confederate States of America, whose treason was defeated by force of arms one hundred and fifty years ago, and whose recidivist attitudes to their former slaves was finally ended by force of law half a century ago.
And it is with the memory of the bloodshed on both those occasions, and with the sad acceptance that Republicans’ true character is “marked by every act which may define a Tyrant”, we have concluded that their party and its adherents are unfit to participate in the government of a free people.
“We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations” and misrepresentations of our shared past. They have been “deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity.”
It is with the knowledge of the blood shed in the past and the understanding that the history of a Nation is one of perpetual evolution that we sadly acquiesce in the necessity of declaring our separation. We acknowledge that the animating ideas of the Republican Party are not those of the United States but those of the Confederate States and believe we are absolved from all Allegiance to those who hold them and act on them and that therefore the time has come to sever all political connection between us and them.
We invoke the same “Natural Law and Nature’s God” that gave courage to the Signatories of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. This Deus Sive Natura, is not the Redeemer or Savior God of Christianity, but the idea of nature that motivated the Enlightenment philosophers whose theories reached their perfect realization in the Declaration of Independence. We call upon this idea of the Founders that it may provide the wisdom to find an amicable settlement for this Bill of Divorcement of 2017, one that respects our shared history and acknowledges our irreconcilable differences.
Michael Goldfarb is the host of the FRDH Podcast … to which you should be listening regularly.
