No 'Creator' in Obama's Declaration?

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Jul 04, 2012

Phyllis Schlafly notices that when he quotes a famous line from the Declaration of Independence, President Obama regularly drops a few words from the text. It doesn’t seem to be a careless error, she remarks: “Obama has done this so often that it can't be a slip of the tongue or a glitch of the teleprompter.”

Here’s the way President Obama renders the line:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Notice anything missing? Here’s the actual text, with the missing words in bold.

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.

As the Fortnight for Freedom concludes, Schlafly’s observation underlines the importance of restoring a proper appreciation for the role of natural law. The Declaration, you will recall, invokes “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” Obama seems reluctant to recognize that Authority.

If our natural rights do not come from the Creator, where do they come from? Does the state grant them to us? If the state grants them, they are not natural rights; they are political artifacts, which the government could take away.

If our nation’s chief executive deliberately refuses to recognize the origin of our rights—even to the point of misquoting a line that every American grammar-school student should know—our troubles may be deeper than we realize.