Via David Brody’s blog, I see The Weekly Standard is upset that President Obama, inadvertently, apparently, omitted the words “endowed by their Creator” when quoting the Declaration of Independence in a speech last week. This is proof, in the conservative mind, that Obama is either a godless liberal or an anti-American one, or both.
I’ve heard the words “endowed by their Creator” cited countless times by conservatives in recent months. Michele Bachmann, Mike Huckabee, and others brought cited it at the Values Voters Summit. It’s how they claim that the Bill of Rights was divinely ordained and therefore can’t be tampered with by the big evil government. The way this argument goes, the drafters of the Constitution didn’t make up those rights, they were merely writing down what God told them to do.
At Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition conference earlier this month, Newt Gingrich claimed, “Obama doesn’t understand anything about that sentence” because “secular socialists” don’t understand it. The Declaration of Independence is a document Gingrich maintains proves “American exceptionalism,” which of course a Kenyan anti-colonialist doesn’t understand either.
In a depressing, ridiculous, maddening sign of the times, the White House press office actually issued a statement to Brody that “The President is in full agreement with the Declaration of Independence.”
