Civitas Outlook
Contributors
John Yoo
Senior Research Fellow
Summary
The Declaration of Independence not only announced American independence from Europe; it created a nation that, over a century and a half later, would ensure Europe’s independence.
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his year’s 250th anniversary of the American Revolution celebrates the Declaration of Independence’s proclamation of natural rights. And rightly so. The Declaration boldly stated three “self-evident” truths before a “candid world”: that “all men are created equal”; that “they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”; and that “among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Upon its signing, the American people were no longer subjects of a monarch, but citizens of a republic, whose purpose was to protect their rights.
Much of this year’s commentary will focus on the meaning of those rights. Vincent Philip Muñoz recently argued in these pages that the revolutionaries spoke of natural rights as derived from their religious faith. He and other political theorists emphasize the natural-rights foundations of the Revolution to respond to criticism from the political left, which claims the founders did not include minorities and women in their vision of the equality of “all men,” and from the right, which blames the Declaration’s elevation of individual autonomy over traditional morality for modern societal ills. These debates over the meaning of the Declaration began shortly after our nation’s birth; they will continue well beyond its 250th anniversary.
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