Quotes about Equality

Cautioning against socialist wealth confiscation schemes, Lincoln told a delegation of workingmen during the Civil War, "Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him labor diligently and build one of his own."

Majorities, no less than minorities, need the assurance that they are being treated fairly, otherwise they are sure to mobilize through democratic channels to affirm their interests. By not only tolerating but enshrining it in law, proportional representation is rapidly balkanizing the country along racial lines, destroying the confidence of citizens that the law will treat them equally and provoking a strong and largely justified backlash.

Republicans, meanwhile, to one degree or another, all opposed slavery. The party itself was founded to stop slavery.

By contrast, Blanche K. Bruce was the real deal. Born into slavery in Virginia, Bruce was freed by his master and studied at Oberlin College before becoming a successful farmer and landowner. He is the only former slave to have served in the U.S. Senate.

The Republican ethos underlying these landmark provisions was aptly framed by the great abolitionist Republican, Frederick Douglass. Douglass said, "It is evident that white and black must fall or flourish together. In light of this great truth, laws ought to be enacted, and institutions established—all distinctions, founded on complexion, and every right, privilege and immunity, now enjoyed by the white man, ought to be as freely granted to the man of color."

This was the clarion cry taken up by the GOP in the aftermath of the Civil War. Virtually all the black leaders who emerged from that era were Republicans who supported the GOP's call to remove race as the basis of government policy and social action. Historian Eric Foner writes that black activists of the antebellum era embraced "an affirmation of Americanism that insisted blacks were entitled to the same rights and opportunities that white citizens enjoyed."

Notice that the GOP program—articulated by Douglass and affirmed by black leaders—is none other than the color-blind ideal outlined in Martin Luther King's famous "dream." King envisioned a society in which we are judged by the content of our character, not the color of our skin. This is substantially what Douglass and other black Republicans called for, more than a century earlier.

The Declaration of Independence does not mean we are equal in endowments, only in rights.

How interesting that the Democrat, Martin Luther King, is identified with a principle that the Republican, Frederick Douglass, expressed even more eloquently so much earlier. How bizarre that the Democrats are presumed to be the party of civil rights when the very content of civil rights was formulated and developed by the GOP.

The earliest opponents of slavery in America were Christians, mostly Quakers and evangelical Christians. They took seriously the biblical idea that we are all equal in the eyes of God, and interpreted it to mean that no person has the right to rule another person without his consent.

Today's socialist Left, however, wants an America that integrates the groups seen as previously excluded while excluding the group that was previously included. "If you are white, male, heterosexual, and religiously or socially conservative," writes author and editor Rod Dreher, "there's no place for you" on the progressive left.

Soon Jews were also removed and excluded from journalism, farming, teaching, and the theater. By 1938, Jews could not practice investment banking or the professions of law and medicine. This combination of segregation and state-sponsored discrimination against Jews mirrors what the Democrats did to African Americans.