Maggie's Farm

As the Fourth of July approaches, I think it's important to note we celebrate this day as our Independence Day. We don't celebrate September 3 and the signing of the Treaty of Paris wherein the King of England recognized our independence, we celebrate July 4, the day we said we were free. And that was the founding of America. America was not founded on the Constitution, it was founded on the Declaration of Independence, specifically some of the most beautiful words in the English language: "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."

The Constitution merely founded that necessary evil we call government. That's where that next line comes from: "That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it...." Don't confuse America and America's government. The Constitution is not a sacred document, the Declaration of Independence is.

And I don't say that lightly, I've frequently said that the first American was Martin Luther, the guy who stood up to the Pope and said "God gave me a brain and a conscience the same as any man and I'm just as fit as any man to understand the Word, to decide for myself Good and Evil and Right and Wrong - no mortal man has the authority to come between me and my God." And everything else flows from that.