{"id":66150,"date":"2026-05-08T08:03:53","date_gmt":"2026-05-08T13:03:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wlbott.com\/?p=66150"},"modified":"2026-05-08T08:03:53","modified_gmt":"2026-05-08T13:03:53","slug":"all-men-are-created-equal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wlbott.com\/?p=66150","title":{"rendered":"All Men Are Created Equal"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Let us take a moment to reflect on Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Three sentences, two hundred and seventy one words, beginning with:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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On November 19 [1863], Lincoln traveled to Gettysburg, where he spoke at a ceremony dedicating Gettysburg National Cemetery, which honored the fallen Union soldiers and redefined the purpose of the Civil War in his famed Gettysburg Address, a 271-word speech that has endured as one of the most famous in American history.<\/p>\nWikipedia<\/a><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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The phrase “all men are created equal” was from the Declaration of Independence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This phrase is credited to Benjamin Franklin.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
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The quotation “all men are created equal” is found in the United States Declaration of Independence and is a phrase that has come to be seen as emblematic of America’s founding ideals. The final form of the sentence was stylized by Benjamin Franklin, and penned by Thomas Jefferson during the beginning of the Revolutionary War in 1776. It reads:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“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.”<\/p>\nWikipedia<\/a><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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This document, of course, came from a majority of slave owning rich white men.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Based on historical records, 41 of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence were slaveholders at some point in their lives. These men, including primary author Thomas Jefferson, owned hundreds of enslaved people collectively, while others owned only a few, or married into slave-owning families.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence were, with few exceptions, men of substantial wealth, education, and high social standing.<\/p>\n– Gemini<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Let’s look at the phrase “all men are created equal” as an ideal, a goal to strive for, rather than a reflection of the reality of the signers. I feel that Lincoln was re empathizing that ideal in his Gettysburg Address.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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And Then There’s Today<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The racist majority on the Supreme Court recently gutted the Voting Rights Act – the act that tried to mitigate the 125 year effort to keep Blacks from voting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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On April 29, 2026<\/strong>, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Louisiana v. Callais<\/strong> that Louisiana’s congressional map, which included a second majority-Black district, was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The decision restricts the Voting Rights Act (VRA) by making it harder to challenge redistricting maps that dilute minority voting power, requiring proof of intentional discrimination rather than just discriminatory effects. <\/p>\n– Gemini<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

In essence, Black Americans will have NO<\/strong> representation in congress in the racist southern states.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The racist southern states immediately rammed through legislation to disenfranchise Blacks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"\"\/<\/figure>\nThe Guardian<\/a><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
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The claims Samuel Alito, a supreme court justice, made about voter turnout in Louisiana in a landmark Voting Rights Act case were based on a misleading data analysis, a Guardian review has found.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey had to fudge how they\u2019re calculating the turnout rate to get there, and they\u2019re not even taking into account margin of error, and all these other methodology issues about the current population survey to arrive at that number,\u201d he said. \u201cSomeone knew what they were doing.\u201d<\/strong><\/em>
– The Guardian<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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From Gemini<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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As of 2024\u20132026 data, approximately 31% to 33% of Louisiana’s population is Black or African American. This represents one of the highest percentages of Black residents in the United States, often ranking 3rd among all states.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As of 2026, approximately 16.76% of Tennessee’s population identifies as Black or African American, totaling over 1.2 million residents. Black residents constitute the largest racial minority in the state, with significant populations in major cities such as Memphis, Jackson, and Nashville.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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How the magaT Make It Happen<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

A picture is worth a thousand hooded republican klansmen….<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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We’ve selected political cartoon from American newspapers that are still allowed to publish opinions contrary to the regime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Let us take a moment to reflect on Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Three sentences, two hundred and seventy one words, beginning with: On November 19 [1863], Lincoln traveled to Gettysburg, where he spoke at a ceremony dedicating Gettysburg National Cemetery, which honored the fallen Union soldiers and redefined the purpose of the Civil War in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[168,130],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-banality-of-evil","category-gravediggers-of-american-democracy"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wlbott.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wlbott.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wlbott.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wlbott.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wlbott.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=66150"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.wlbott.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66150\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66165,"href":"https:\/\/www.wlbott.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66150\/revisions\/66165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wlbott.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=66150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wlbott.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=66150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wlbott.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=66150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}