As a sitting U.S. Supreme Court justice, Justice Neil Gorsuch has distinguished himself as one of the nation’s foremost originalists in constitutional interpretation, seeking the original understanding of the text at the time that it was written. Like conservative stalwart Justice Clarence Thomas, Gorsuch also favors natural law jurisprudence, the belief that particular moral laws are established in nature and can be discovered and clarified through reason.

Despite his fierce originalism, Gorsuch still somehow fails to grasp the essence of the United States of America and the understanding of the nation clearly articulated by the Founding Fathers, recently parroting the misguided claim that America is a “creedal nation,” nothing more, in fact, than a series of propositions: in short, just an idea.

“The Declaration of Independence had three great ideas in it: that all of us are equal, that each of us has inalienable rights given to us by God, not government, and that we have the right to rule ourselves,” Gorsuchobserved in a recent podcast appearance, discussing America’s founding document and the legacy of the Founding Fathers. However, he continued, “Our nation is not founded on a religion. It’s not based on a common culture, even, or heritage. It’s based on those ideas. We’re a creedal nation.”

The Supreme Court’s first chief justice, John Jay, who also served as president of the Second Continental Congress and a co-author of both “The Federalist Papers” and the Constitution itself, did not agree with Gorsuch’s assessment, nearly 250 years removed from the actual foundation of the nation. As a matter of fact, nearly all of America’s Founding Fathers would have, based upon their own immortalized words and writing, rejected Gorsuch’s statement. In Federalist No. 2, Jay wrote:

“Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people — a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence. This country and this people seem to have been made for each other.”

Here’s where Jay and Gorsuch do agree: the rights which the American government was established to protect are rights given to man by God, not rights which originate within the government itself. But Jay’s definition of a nation — specifically, the American nation — is utterly at odds with Gorsuch’s.

The nation, Jay contended, was not founded upon mere ideas, but is defined by its people, who in turn are defined by a common ancestry, a common heritage, a common language, a common religion, and common manners and customs, or culture. This is a direct contradiction of Gorsuch’s claim: “Our nation is not founded on a religion. It’s not based on a common culture, even, or heritage.”

Those ideas — that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, and that they have a right to govern their own selves — are not the foundation of the American nation. They are, rather, the fruits of this nation’s spiritual soil, the results of a distinct people with a common religion, a common culture, a common heritage. No religion other than Christianity could have produced such a charter for a government.

All men are created equal? This belief certainly did not originate in India, where women were burned as property on the funeral pyres of their deceased husbands, and where even today a caste system, intimately intertwined with the Hindu religion, still dominates social and even political life.

This notion cannot be traced to China’s Confucius, who advocated a strict hierarchy and class system. It did not come from the then-mighty Ottoman Empire, a Muslim domain which often persecuted Christians and other non-Muslims. Nowhere can it be found in the superstitious beliefs of the African continent of the time, where tribe or clan identity defined one’s worth and where slavery was far more commonplace than in either Europe or the New World.

Source: VidNews » Feed