All Men Are Created Equal, Endowed by Their Creator--Stop Right There! I Gotta Know Right Now.

Ken Cuccinelli, Roanoke Free Press

TPMDC has the story of a Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli speech in 2009 where he was all up in that Natural Law.

“We are a natural law country and we have the greatest foundation in the history of the world. And the one sentence you all know, ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator’ — and I’m gonna stop right there. That sentence, Dr. Martin Luther King called that our national creed. I think that is a great title for that sentence. It is the foundation in my view, it’s the vision statement for America. And the foundation of that foundation is endowed by their Creator. And if we disconnect from that, we don’t have a rational basis to defend the foundation that we’ve got.”

Cuccinelli is a smart guy. He got a  J.D. George Mason Law, and an M.A. in International Commerce and Policy from George Mason. I'm pretty sure he's had a few American History courses, and he probably did well. So when he talks about "all men created equal" and puts MLK in there, he knows damn well he's overlooking the fact that when those old, white, Deist slave owners* wrote that constitution, Martin Luther King would not  have been considered "equal."

So, right off the bat, he knows that our definition of natural law changes. Being a Virginia Republican, Cuccinelli is trapped hunting for votes from some pretty serious neo-confederates. But Virginia's a pretty purple state. So if he wants to be Governor, he's got to throw some double BS out there, where he makes himself not seem like a racist because he mentions MLK, but he hits that dog whistle for the good old boys, that whole "those other people aren't equal" thing. Just replace black people with gay people.

Gotta be hatin' on somebody.

Remember, Lee Atwater, one of the best southern strategists, noted that you had to speak in code. You had to get all abstract, because just coming right out and saying "nigger" like you could back in the day would backfire on you.

So, to get all abstract with this "natural law" thing, he conflates the Declaration of Independence with the Constitution. The Constitution has no mention of God. The constitutional concept of natural law comes mainly from the ninth amendment which suggests we naturally have more rights than any constitution could ever list. No doubt he was awake at George Mason. He would have learned this basic fact.

The anti-federalists, ironically, were the ones who wanted the Bill of Rights, as a way to limit federal power. And the very first amendment that those old, white, Deist slave owners wrote says that Ken Cuccinelli needs to rethink this whole idea of forcing what you think is "natural law" on the rest of us.

* To be fair, Michele Bachmann (still waiting for a really good quote, Congresswoman) was right, John Jay, a founding father, did fight tirelessly against slavery, so they weren't all slave owners.