07/05/2022
We don’t mark our nation’s birth from the day a battle was won or a treaty signed. We mark it from the day we put words on paper and told the world who we are: “Free and Independent States.”
Our right to make such a declaration, we argued, was based on the self-evident truth “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.”
Our nation has changed in countless ways over 246 years. But these truths still stand.
And we still stand ready to defend them.
