BrianGarst.com

For the third time, Obama has elected to redact “endowed by their Creator” from a recitation of the text of the Declaration of Independence.  No longer a possible fluke, this omission is now a clear pattern. What does it mean?

The reason Obama refuses to say that rights are endowed by our Creator does not come from any religious animosity.  The statement itself, after all, was religiously ambiguous.  Rather, the point of the phrase is to acknowledge that true rights come from our status as human beings, and thus precede the existence of government.  This was necessary to explain why the King of Britain was an oppressor and the colonists were justified to rebel.  Statists resist this view, because such rights then serve as a limit on the power of government.

Obama believes that the state is the originator of all “rights.”  He believes that it’s perfectly valid for him to get together with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and declare that free health care is a “right.” But rights don’t work that way. The danger of this statist view is that, what the state giveth, it can taketh away.  A state that can create “rights” out of thin air can erase them just as easily. Think you have a right to self defense? Not if Obama and the gun haters get their way. Think you have a right to your property? Not when the redistributionists decide that it’s unfair for you to have more while others have less. This is why Obama refuses to acknowledge the origins of our rights, and why his deliberate ignorance is so dangerous.

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