In Lesson 2 of The Jenny Beth Show founding-principles series, Jenny Beth Martin and Bill Norton pick up the Declaration of Independence right where the last lesson ended and go deep on the rights the founders said no government can touch. Why "endowed" and "unalienable" are the two most powerful words in the sentence, why the founders insisted our rights are so permanent that not even the Creator who gave them can take them back, and how life, liberty, and property are inseparably connected, so that when government seizes one, it quietly steals all three.
Guest: Bill Norton, constitutional scholar, founding-principles educator, and author of Behind the Bill of Rights and the forthcoming Behind the Declaration of Independence.
In this lesson:
• Why John Adams said our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people
• How the founders rejected the divine right of kings and any claim to rule without consent
• "Among these" — the founders believed there are far more rights than the three Jefferson named
• The right to life as the right to self-preservation, and how it connects to self-defense
• Jefferson's "rightful liberty": freedom bounded only by the equal liberty of others
• John Locke and property: your labor makes it yours, so life plus liberty equals property
• The people's right to alter or abolish a government that turns to despotism, and the duty to act
• Madison's warning that liberty is lost by gradual, silent encroachment, not sudden seizure
• The friendship, feud, and reconciliation of Jefferson and Adams, who died hours apart on July 4, 1826
The Jenny Beth Show airs live Monday through Friday at 1:00 PM ET. Hosted by Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the Tea Party movement and Chairman of Tea Party Patriots Action. Subscribe for daily analysis of politics, policy, and the fight for constitutionally limited government. teapartypatriots.org
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