HAPPY BIRTHDAY, AMERICA — GROWING PAINS AND ALL
Our Founding Fathers fought for America and penned a Declaration of Independence that provides an enduring framework for freedom — one that leaves room for improvements and remains an evolving work-in-progress some 241 years later.
“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.”
That wonderful and probably best-known sentence of the Declaration of Independence, ratified on July 4, 1776, has been a great foundation for this strong and ever-changing nation.
Much of our nation’s change — both in the country and in our Constitution — has come just in the past 100 years. And it comes, of course, in fits and starts and sometimes backward steps.
In 1920, the ratification of the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote. Equal pay laws, equal credit laws and other gender equality measures followed, but women are still waiting for the reality of equal pay. Now the nation’s average disparity is that women make 82 cents for every $1 earned by men. (In Tennessee, that’s 81 cents, while in Georgia and Alabama, it’s 80.7 cents and 76.1 cents, respectively.)
Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law just two days before the country’s 188th July 4th holiday. A year later, he and his congressional allies passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But in 2013, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, and many Republican-controlled states have been systematically passing laws aimed at making women and blacks jump through ridiculous hoops to vote.
Today we have a president who, though he won the election with the Electoral College, dubiously claims he lost the popular vote because 3 million fraudulent votes were cast for his opponent. He had and has no proof of this, of course. State and national election officials dispute it. Nonetheless, he created a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.
That commission last week sent letters to every state requesting full names, addresses, birth dates, political party, voting history, military status and the last four digits of every voter’s Social Security Number — all to be amassed in some Trump government database. (If Barack Obama was coming for your gun, Trump is coming for your voter registration card. And never mind Russian hacking and interference in our election. Trump says that’s a hoax.)
Nearly 30 states — including Tennessee — are refusing to give up our privacy. It is democracy in action.
In 2015, the Supreme Court ruled that health care access is a right, and gays have the same right to marry as all other Americans. This year, the high court will decide if a baker has a religious right to refuse making a wedding cake for a gay couple. Democracy in action.
Also on the court’s agenda this year is President Donald Trump’s travel ban that doubles as a Muslim ban — more religious tests for our Declaration of Independence and Constitution, which exist primarily because American colonists wanted freedom from the religious straightjackets of England. Clearly democracy must prove itself over and over.
Democracy is messy. Our founders understood that and even planned for it, expecting us to keep working on this wonderful and free country we call America.
We can do it. We always have.
Happy birthday, America.