Mr. Moderate

According to this article on the CNN web site, Rush Limbaugh spoke Saturday at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington DC, where he continued to display his deliberate confusion over the founding documents of our government. According to that CNN article, Rush said this:

We love and revere our founding documents, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. We believe that the preamble of the Constitution contains an inarguable truth, that we are all endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, freedom — and the pursuit of happiness.

For the record, here is the actual preamble of the Constitution of the United States of America:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Rush was confusing the Constitution with the Declaration of Independence, whose text includes the words Rush attributes to the Constitution:

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.

It must be noted that the Declaration of Independence is in no sense a law binding upon the citizens of the United States of America. It was passed by the Continental Congress as a declaration of war against King George III of England many years prior to the drafting of the Constitution which established a foundation for our laws and our entire system of government. The Declaration of Independence was also not in any way subject to ratification by the people or legislatures of the original thirteen colonies whose representatives enacted said Declaration. It was, rather, an ordinary law enacted pursuant to an unwritten agreement between the colonies to engage in joint action with respect to this very issue: independence from England. At the time of the passage of the Declaration, war had already broken out, and English armed units were already taking various actions against the American colonies, so the Declaration wasn’t any real news but rather a statement of the obvious. Many of Jefferson’s ideas for the 1775 Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms found their way into the 1776 Declaration of Independence.

The Declaration also came more than a year prior to the writing of the Articles of Confederation, a document which was narrowly drafted to allow for the creation of a small central government to jointly handle the war with England and other external affairs for the original colonies. Accordingly, the Declaration of Independence cannot even be claimed as an act of the legislative body created by those Articles.

The Constitution of the United States of America was rather deliberately drafted to not establish or privilege any particular set of religious beliefs as being in any way special for the citizens and government of the United States. After a substantial debate, the drafters of the Constitution did not even include language in the Preamble which claimed a descent of rights from any sort of a supreme being. As the individual states were formed by disparate religious groups with widely divergent ideas on matters of religion, it was felt that the best approach was to avoid, as much as possible, any debates over matters of religion in the foundation and operation of our government.

Now, the modern conservative movement is attempting to draft God into their right-wing conservative cause and to claim that the founders of our nation really did intend to establish a Christian theocracy even though the actual historical record can only be interpreted in exactly the opposite fashion. Well, Rush Limbaugh, as the propagandist-in-chief for these budding theocrats, remains a big fat idiot for thinking he can pull the wool over the eyes of American patriots on a matter of this importance! It is for the obvious purpose of regaining political power that the right wing attempts to claim that God is on their side. Mankind should always be wary when any political group makes any claim of that sort. After all, one important Nazi mottos was “Gott Mit Uns” (God is with us). Ancient leaders, such as Egypt’s pharaohs, claimed to actually be God incarnate. Modern leaders cannot be that bold, but they can still claim to be God’s favorites and to ask for the votes of the people on that ground alone. This, obviously, has nothing at all to do with which group of politicians will actually do the best for the aid and comfort of the people.