Tag: declaration of independence

Public School Slaps ‘Does Not Endorse’ Stickers on US Constitution, Declaration of Independence

Only in today’s education climate could a public school district accidentally label the Constitution and Declaration of Independence as materials it “does not endorse.”

Yet that is exactly what happened in Anchorage, Alaska, earlier this month.

Anchorage Daily News reported that the Anchorage School District placed non-endorsement stickers on booklets containing the founding documents.

A parent posted a photo of the label on Nov. 3. The sticker read, “The Anchorage School District does not endorse these materials or the viewpoint expressed in them.”

The picture spread quickly across social media. Too many parents to count were rightly outraged that such a warning appeared on the most essential texts in American civic life.

District representative MJ Thim said the label was placed on the booklets erroneously.

Thim explained that the stickers are normally used for flyers and posters from outside organizations.

“This was our mistake,” he wrote in an email.

Thim said the stickers were used because that is standard practice for items that are not official district publications.

He said the district will review its procedures to make sure this does not happen again.

Thim also emphasized that the Constitution and Declaration of Independence are taught in every school. He said these documents “reflect the values we want every student to understand.”

Parents, however, found the incident troubling.

Karen Waldron, who posted the image on Facebook, said she was “honestly stunned.” She noted that these are not controversial documents, but the very foundation of our government.

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Tim Kaine’s Constitutional blasphemy

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) this week warned the American people that a Trump nominee for a State Department position was an extremist, cut from the same cloth as the Iranian mullahs and religious extremists.

Riley Barnes, nominated to serve as assistant secretary of State for democracy, human rights and labor, revealed his dangerous proclivities to Kaine in his opening statement when he said that “all men are created equal because our rights come from God, our creator; not from our laws, not from our governments.”

It was a line that should be familiar to any citizen — virtually ripped from the Declaration of Independence, our founding document that is about to celebrate its 250th anniversary.

Yet Kaine offered a very surprising response in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing.

“The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government, but come from the Creator — that’s what the Iranian government believes,” he said. “It’s a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Shia (sic) law and targets Sunnis, Bahá’ís, Jews, Christians, and other religious minorities. They do it because they believe that they understand what natural rights are from their Creator. So, the statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling.”

The idea that laws “come from the government” is the basis of what is called “legal positivism,” which holds that the legitimacy and authority of laws are not based on God or natural law but rather legislation and court decisions.

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Tim Kaine shockingly compares the Declaration of Independence to Iran’s theocratic regime: ‘Extremely troubling’

Democrat Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia failed to understand one of America’s basic founding principles and instead likened it to the Iranian regime.

In a Wednesday committee hearing, Kaine insisted that our natural rights are derived from the government, not from God. Kaine went on to say that the notion that our natural rights come from the Creator is “extremely troubling” and compared it to Iran’s theocracy.

Unfortunately for Kaine, the founding fathers disagree with him.

“The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government, but come from the Creator. That’s what the Iranian government believes,” Kaine said. “It’s a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Shia law [sic] … and they do it because they believe that they understand what natural rights are from their Creator.”

“The statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling.”

Unfortunately for Kaine, the founding fathers disagree with him.

The Declaration of Independence makes very clear that our natural rights come from God and not from the government, as Kaine suggested. In the second paragraph, the Declaration states that “all men are created equal” and that “they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Prominent conservatives and politicians were quick to correct Kaine’s misunderstanding of our nation’s core values, even suggesting that he is “not fit to serve.”

“This is a remarkable moment from Tim Kaine,” the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh said in a post on X. “He just announced that the core foundational principle of our country, affirmed in the Declaration of Independence, is ‘extremely troubling’ and ‘theocratic.’ He should be immediately removed from office. Anyone who rejects our nation’s foundational principles is obviously not fit to serve.”

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Renewing a Desecrated Declaration of Independence

In 1776, Thomas Paine set a revolutionary tone rejecting the King: “But where, say some, is the King of America? … as far as we approve of monarchy… in America the law is king.”

The American Revolution replaced the authority of a sovereign with the authority of a written Constitution and a people who govern themselves. Paine’s vision was the bedrock of the American Revolution, a declaration that no person — not a king, not a president, not a general — would stand above the law. 

Today, nearly 250 years later, that vision is dimming, not because the words have faded, but because the institutions meant to uphold them have withered. And at the heart of this erosion is a truth too many fear to speak: we are witnessing the collapse of the implicit moral principles of the Declaration, the American promise of liberty under law.

The conduct of America’s current chief executive recalls the cadence of the usurpations of George III, iterated in the July 4, 1776, Declaration of Independence. We have arrived at a George III moment.

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Independence From Empire Day 2025

We are independent of London, but are we independent of Washington? Is there more freedom when governed by one tyrant 3,000 miles away or by 3,000 tyrants a few miles away?
Does government today remotely resemble the values articulated on July 4th 1776?

When the president of the United States bombs the lawful facilities of a foreign country that pose no threat whatsoever to American national security and does so without a congressional declaration of war as the Constitution requires; when thousands of non-violent folks in America are arrested by masked federal agents without warrants and kicked out of the country without due process; when troops patrol the streets of a large city in defiance of federal law; when both major political parties support mass surveillance, undeclared foreign wars and borrowing trillions of dollars a year to fund a bloated government — nearly all of which is nowhere countenanced by the Constitution — we can safely conclude that personal liberty in our once-free society has been radically diminished and is in the twilight of its existence.

Two hundred and forty-nine years ago this week, Thomas Jefferson was fuming in his rented rooms in Philadelphia as the Continental Congress was softening the tone of his final draft of what would become the most critical document and radical articulation of the origins of human freedom in American history. [Read Jefferson’s first draft.]

The Declaration of Independence is an indictment of King George III as well as a manifestation of limited government and maximum individual freedom.

Though the final version dropped some of Jefferson’s more bellicose language, the document as we know it is largely his — not only his lofty language but also the three principal Jeffersonian values that it manifests.

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Federal Judge Orders UO to Pay $191K to PSU Professor Blocked for “All Men Are Created Equal” Comment

The University of Oregon is facing the financial consequences of an unconstitutional attempt to suppress speech after a federal judge ordered it to pay $191,000 in legal fees to Portland State University professor Bruce Gilley.

The order, issued by US District Judge John V. Acosta, follows a settlement reached in March 2025 in which the university acknowledged Gilley’s comments should not have been censored and agreed to implement major policy reforms.

The legal fees, which will be covered by UO’s insurer United Educators, include $147,070 awarded to the Institute for Free Speech (IFS) and $43,930 to the Angus Lee Law Firm.

These payments, combined with more than $533,000 that the university had already spent on its own legal representation by late 2024, push the cost of defending its actions to at least $724,000.

That figure excludes further expenses accrued since November.

These high costs are directly tied to UO’s decision to support its DEI officials after they blocked Gilley for replying “all men are created equal” to a university post on X.

This fee award reflects the substantial resources required to vindicate fundamental constitutional rights in the digital age, as well as the vigor with which the University of Oregon chose to defend unconstitutional policies,” said Del Kolde, IFS Senior Attorney.

“The university made a costly decision to prioritize DEI principles over constitutional principles, aggressively litigating this case for nearly three years rather than acknowledging the obvious, that blocking someone for quoting the Declaration of Independence violates the First Amendment.”

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Constitution, Declaration Of Independence Now Have ‘Trigger Warnings’ On National Archives Site

Digital copies of America’s founding documents — as well as other historical documents in the National Archives’ online catalog — now feature “trigger warnings” alerting readers that they may contain “harmful language,” and the change appears to follow the release of a “little-noticed” report from a National Archives racism task force that suggested the agency provide “context” for its historical materials.

Digital copies of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, most notably, now feature a “Harmful Language Alert,” which appears at the top of the page, and directs users to a National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) statement on “potentially harmful content.”

The NARA does not specify why the Constitution, Declaration, or Bill of Rights received the warning, but the NARA statement indicates that documents and historical materials are marked as having “harmful language” when they:

  • reflect racist, sexist, ableist, misogynistic/misogynoir, and xenophobic opinions and attitudes;
  • be discriminatory towards or exclude diverse views on sexuality, gender, religion, and more;
  • include graphic content of historical events such as violent death, medical procedures, crime, wars/terrorist acts, natural disasters and more;
  • demonstrate bias and exclusion in institutional collecting and digitization policies.

Trigger warnings are listed as just one of a number of solutions to the problem of providing historical documents to an increasingly “diverse community,” the NARA notes, and are part of an “institutional commitment” to “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

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