This time I disagree with Ms. Harris-Perry. To ignore the brilliance and courage of Jefferson’s words is to dismiss the ideas that we all live by. The founders did not just overturn King George, they destroyed the entire edifice of the natural or divine right of rulers .. including their own rights over their women and slaves.
Shortly after Mitt Romney selected a Veep, Melissa Harris-Perry took issue with Paul Ryan’s quoting Thomas Jefferson’s line in the Declaration of Independence. Ryan had boasted of Jefferson’s giving credit to the “Creator” for our rights ans humans, Melissa dissed Ryan:
“The thing I really have against him is actually how he and Gov. Romney have misused the Declaration of Independence. I’m deeply irritated by their notion that the ‘pursuit of happiness’ means money for the richest and that we extricate the capacity of ordinary people to pursue happiness. When they say ‘God and nature give us our rights, not government,’ that is a lovely thing to say as a wealthy white man.”
“When you sit in a body like mine as an African-American woman, you know that God and nature have in fact made us — inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” she continued. “But we could not have them until there was a Civil War that allowed the federal government to impose those nature and God-given rights would actually be respected by our government. And I think that they cannot continue to go down this line on the Declaration of Independence.”