What Liberals Believe about Equality

Second in a series on the liberal perspective on human rights.
 

Liberals believe in equality before the law, and they believe it for real rather than just paying lip service to the concept.  The Declaration of Independence famously states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…”  Liberals like Abraham Lincoln believed that meant slavery was inconsistent with the principles of freedom.  “No man is good enough to govern another man, without that man’s consent,” he said.  Conservatives looked for reasons to create exceptions.  Surely, they felt, equality, though a good concept for white, Christian, property-owning men, could not apply to blacks, people of other non-Caucasian races, slaves, Jews, Hindus, women and the landless.  All couldn’t really mean “all,” could it? 

The Fourteenth Amendment avows, “No State shall…deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”  Liberals like Elizabeth Cady Stanton believed that meant women, as well as men, deserved the right to vote.  It took 72 years and a constitutional amendment, the Nineteenth, to accomplish that.  Some, such as conservative Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, still don’t think the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment requires equal rights for women.  Here is what he said about it:  “In 1868, when the 39th Congress was debating and ultimately proposing the 14th Amendment, I don't think anybody would have thought that equal protection applied to sex discrimination, or certainly not to sexual orientation. So does that mean that we've gone off in error by applying the 14th Amendment to both?  Yes, yes. Sorry, to tell you that.”  So, we still have people, even prominent ones, looking for reasons to deny equal rights. 

Liberals, on the other hand, take the wording at face value.  No one can be denied equal rights, period.  In proposing legislation to end the racial discrimination against African-Americans in his day, President John F. Kennedy observed, “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue.”  Kennedy based his views on strong sources.   Where should we search for the right answer to this issue?  He said, "It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.  The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated.”  His answer, based on both, was an emphatic “Yes!”  Modern liberals are proud to emphatically agree.      

The uncompromising liberal view of equality has therefore been applied in a wider and wider circle over the centuries.  The principle was clearly enunciated in the beginning of the country, but was not realized in many people’s daily lives.  The pursuit of the dream to bring Jefferson’s words to fruition continues in our own time, concentrating now most urgently on the LGBT community.  This unfinished work shows liberalism at its best.  Carved over the entrance to the Supreme Court building are the words “EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW.”  The views of certain retrograde Associate Justices not withstanding, that is what liberals continue to strive for, confident in the ultimate realization of America's egalitarian founding ethos.  As Martin Luther King declared, "the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice."