Small: Thomas’ warning should be heeded

Thomas’ warning should be heeded

By Jonathan Small

 

In April 15 remarks at the University of Texas at Austin, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas warned that progressivism threatens a core element of the United States’ founding—the belief that it is “self-evident” that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” as described in the Declaration of Independence.

 

Americans need to take Thomas’ warning seriously.

 

Although he grew up in the segregated South, Thomas noted that black citizens enduring Jim Crow laws nonetheless understood that they had inherent rights and dignities that came from God, not government.

 

“Despite the multiplicity of laws and customs that reeked of bigotry, it was universally believed among those blacks with whom I lived and who had very little or no formal education, that ‘in God’s eyes and under our Constitution we are equal,’” Thomas said. “This was also the case with my nuns, most of whom were Irish immigrants. At home, at school, and at Church, we were taught that we are inherently equal; that equality came from God; and that it could not be diminished by man. We were made in the image and likeness of God. That proposition was not debatable and was beyond the power of man to alter. Others, with power and animus, could treat us as unequal but they lacked the divine power to make us so.”

 

The idea that government determined a person’s

 worth was obviously false, he noted.

 

“When you lived in a segregated world with palpable discrimination and the governments nearest to you enforced laws and customs that promoted unequal treatment, it was obvious that you did not get your rights or your dignity from those governments, but from God,” Thomas said.

 

He noted the Declaration of Independence ultimately “provided the moral principles by which Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King, Jr. could criticize the institutions of slavery and segregation.”

 

However, the “Progressivism” that emerged in the early 20th Century, championed by former President Woodrow Wilson, “is opposed to those principles,” Thomas said.

 

“Progressives strove to undo the Declaration’s commitment to equality and natural rights, both of which they denied were self-evident,” Thomas said. “To Wilson, the inalienable rights of the individual were ‘a lot of nonsense.’”

 

Thomas noted Wilson also redefined “liberty” so it “no longer preceded the government as a gift from God, but was to be enjoyed at the grace of the government.”

 

When receiving the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs’ Citizenship Award a number of years ago, Thomas noted, “There are many people who are willing to take advantage of freedom and make no effort to sustain it.”

 

Because Wilson’s views are still championed by many “progressives” today, if we treasure our freedom, we must fight to preserve it.

 

Jonathan Small serves as president of the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs.