Hey folks, am I off my rocker here?

[ReformedLiberal]

admin said:

I'm with Lor on this one.

"Men" is generic, here.

(Lor I modified your post to activate the live link, FYI)

The assertions by HistrionicMinor previously cited are commonly used by the far left to paint our founding fathers as a pack of racists instead of visionaries in the arena of human rights. Straight out of Howard Zinn, revisionist extraordinaire.

See item 30 in "The Communist Agenda -1963"

"Discredit the American founding fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the common man."

She is quick to argue what it meant to those who wrote it, when they wrote it. However; she is very stubborn about putting that perspective into a larger context. Such as, how did this compare to contemporaries in other countries? How many countries let anyone vote?

We once argued about the 3/5ths compromise regarding the weighted value of a slave's VOTE. She asserted that it meant blacks were seen as less than human, and so did just about every other moonbat on the board. I made the point that no other country allowed slaves any say whatsoever, and we gave them what amounted to an equal collective say (slaves outnumbered freemen in a number of places), though not equal to the individual. You can easily guess how she and the rest responded to that.

[talkswithbeagles]

If I remember correctly from my school days, the slaves did not vote. They were counted as 3/5 of a person for the purposes of determining the number of representatives a state got in Congress. This had the effect of giving more weight to a slave state resident's vote than a free state resident's vote. This was a compromise because the Southerners wanted to count all the slaves in their population, while the Northerners didn't want to count any of them because they neither voted nor paid taxes.

Be that as it may, I doubt that the authors of the Declaration meant to say anything about voting rights. As I said before, they were just trying to justify their rebellion against England. Nevertheless, the phrase "all men are created equal" has a nice ring to it, and has been adapted to other purposes ever since. Not that there's anything wrong with that; it's just that to claim that the authors of the Declaration meant to say all that other stuff at the time is historicallly incorrect.