The following is not an isolated incident.
Keep reading after the video.
[Note: This originally appeared in my column at Examiner.com]
Now, I know that there might be some sympathy for a mix-up like this. Oh, you know, they're both really old founding documents on parchment with lots of fancy language about freedom and whatnot. I mean, they were both even hand-written with swirly cursive and show up on faded, beige, scroll-y paper. Give a guy a break, right?
NO.
Listen.
It is no longer okay to mix up the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. True, we moderns now tend to conflate these two documents in our collective memory as though they had sprung from the same heated deliberations. But they most certainly did not. The Declaration of Independence (as evidenced by its effing title) was our Dear John letter to Great Britain. It was the result of gut-wrenching debate and struggle, both among legislators and citizens (as well as within themselves), a monumental gamble to turn the continent's back on the motherland, risk death on scales unimaginable, and gamble that a relatively young hodgepodge of commonwealths and provinces could manage to govern itself as a brand new nation. And it was signed by 56 men in 1776.
The Constitution is a whole other ball of wax. It is the framework for the makeup of a national government. It establishes the branches of government, the powers and responsibilities of those branches, and how leaders and representatives will be elected or appointed to fill various positions within them. It was finally ratified in 1788 (get that? Twelve years after the Declaration!), and even that only happened after another proto-constitution, the Articles of Confederation, ratified in 1781, were deemed scrap-worthy in 1787. And what we usually tend to think of when we think of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, didn't even get ratified until 17-frickin'-91! That's 15 years after the Declaration!
So let's be clear. The Declaration of Independence was a letter to King George III saying "buh-bye-and-here's-why." The Constitution was an instruction manual for How to Built the United States Government. They are no more the same document than divorce papers are the same documents as the architectural plans for the singles' apartment complex one soon moves into. Oh, and the architectural plans were drafted twelve years after the divorce papers were filed. I think you get the point.
Here's another way to look at it. The Declaration was an expression of particular ideals and an intention to realize them. The Constitution was and is our attempt to do so.This literal con-fusion of these two documents is criminal--the passing of the centuries is not sufficient excuse for the blurring of these decidedly different documents and decidedly separate moments in history. "The Founding" was not achieved in one fell swoop, and it was not a single event.
It should not be surprising, I suppose, that those on the political right, who have never been predisposed to care about facts or reality to begin with, should opt not to concern themselves over this bit of data either. But every day in our political arena, it is the ideals and notions spelled out in these very two documents that we are fighting over--what they mean, what their implications are, and to whom they apply.
This kind of casual mixing-up of these documents, and the incorrect citations of quotes and passages from them, is a form of hypocrisy. You should not swear to protect and defend something, the contents of which you are wholly unfamiliar. It is akin to those who quote a snippet of scripture and wave their holy books aloft in order to prove a point or assert a moral truth, but have never actually read the book itself or really understand what's in it. Only this is worse, because our founding documents establish something that actually exists.
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Hat tip to Brother Richard for the video.