Tyrannical Consistency

“Its not just absolute power that the founders sought to guard against,” Mr. Obama writes. “Implicit in its structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth — the infallibility of any idea or ideology, or theology, or ‘ism’, any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course.”

–from Barack Obama’s Audacity of Hope, as quoted here

A “rejection of absolute truth”?

Um… What, then, about all these troubling isms:

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

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. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness…

The whole justification for breaking off from England rests on these a priori “truths” perceived to be universal and absolute. To suggest otherwise is intellectually dishonest — a projection of post-modern uncertainty on an 18th-century sensibility.

It’s also dangerous. Any president, or any court, that refuses the authority of these non-negotiable absolutes, ceases to protect its citizenry in any meaningful way.