Politics & Power Quote by Ernie Fletcher

The line ties American identity to the idea of inherent rights, not permissions dispensed by rulers. It echoes the Declaration of Independence, which says people are endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights. That claim was drawn from natural law and Locke’s philosophy: rights exist prior to government, and the purpose of government is to secure them. Framed this way, liberty does not depend on the goodwill of a monarch or a majority. It sets a limit on state power and gives citizens a moral standard by which to judge unjust laws.

Ernie Fletcher invokes this principle to highlight what many see as a distinctive American creed of limited government and robust individual freedoms. The appeal to God places rights beyond politics, making them resilient in the face of shifting majorities. That has had real consequences, giving reformers language to challenge oppression. Abolitionists, suffragists, and civil rights leaders all pressed America to live up to its own stated belief that rights are inherent, not granted.

Yet the claim of difference is complicated. Other nations also adopted Enlightenment ideas of natural rights, and the United States long failed to honor them universally. Slavery, Native dispossession, and the exclusion of women exposed the gap between principle and practice. The saving grace of the creed is that it supplied the moral leverage to narrow that gap.

Grounding rights in God also raises questions in a pluralistic society. Many citizens do not share the same theology, and some justify rights through reason rather than revelation. The founders used capacious language like Creator to bridge that divide, while the Constitution anchored rights in enforceable law. In practice, rights depend on institutions, courts, and civic vigilance. The American difference, then, lies less in perfection than in a durable aspiration: a society where government recognizes, rather than creates, the dignity that individuals already possess.