Good catch...it's a shame that "property" was replaced by "pursuit of happiness". That wordsmithing has caused a lot of mischief.
The ideologues of Hegelian progressivism—the so-called liberals of post-modern political culture—have erased virtually all traces of this nation's founding ethos from the history books in the state schools.
This is disastrous!
I know that some of you, no doubt, are weary of my incessant reiterations regarding the tangible limits of legitimate governmental power and the origins of this nation's founding ethos, but it is due to the widespread ignorance in American today of these things that we are losing our freedom. Ultimately, the people are responsible for checking overweening governmental power. Erase these imperatives from the American consciousness and the Republic of limited government will be lost to us.
That's why I do it, as even a number of conservatives and libertarians on this forum have lost their way, and a few of them have even thought to challenge me concerning the tangible realities of natural law . . . even though they known when their life, liberty or property are being violated. In practical terms, that's all it comes down to. Lockeans don't do ethereal philosophizing. Folks who violate the life, the liberty or the property of others know damn well they had better be prepared to fight or flee.
Locke's triadic construct regarding the essence of the inalienable rights of natural law—
life, liberty and private property—was common knowledge in Great Britain and America for decades before and after the Revolution. That
pursuit of happiness was a term of art alluding to Lock's foundational labor theory of property was common knowledge. As I said in the above, Jefferson is not the origin of that term of art! That Jefferson was merely paraphrasing Locke's triadic construct and reiterating Locke's assertion that God, not the state, is the Source and Guarantor of human rights was common knowledge. That's why they're inalienable! And of course, in his turn, Locke was merely reiterating what Augustine and the Protestant Reformationists declared about the imperatives of natural law and those of nature's God.
Allow me to clarify a few more items as well.
Christianity didn't have to go through any reformation in order to serve as the foundation for the democratization of the West, and the political thought of the Enlightenment is
not monolithic. The Reformation, which made the Enlightenment possible, was merely the second breakout of biblical Christianity that had been suppressed by the by the Roman Catholic Church for centuries.
Aside from the constructs of Le Gendrean
laissez-faire, popularized by Vincent de Gournay, and Montesquieu's theory of separation of powers
, there's not much more to recommend about the sociopolitical theory of Continental Europe from the Enlightenment relative to the constructs of limited republican government and the inalienable rights of natural law, except, of course, for the Augustinian-Calvinist tradition of natural law handed down to Locke who perfected it in terms of civil government, albeit, as directly extrapolated from the sociopolitical ramifications of Judeo-Christianity's ethical system of thought as well, which served as his ontological justification for the following:
(1) The inalienable rights of the people under natural law and the concomitant principle of limited government.
Conservatives and libertarians of classical liberalism stop repeating Lefty's nonsense about how these rights are not absolute when talking about the exercise of legitimate governmental power relative to the collective interactions of the body politic under the terms of the social contract and the inherent boundary of the people's inalienable rights. I don't recall the leftist Senator's name, but he claimed in a dispute with Senator Cruz, "Everybody knows these rights aren't absolute."
Bull!
Inalienable rights are absolute! Period. The boundary of their expression merely goes to the fence that marks the territory of your neighbor's inalienable rights. In other words, there's no such thing as an inalienable right to violate the rights of others. Analogy: I can shout "Fire!" anywhere and at anytime I please, except, of course, when doing so would constitute an imposition on the life, the liberty or the property of others. That's all.
(And the government sure as hell has no legitimate right to prohibit the ownership of or limit the number of militia-grade weapons, i.e., semi-automatic long rifles, the people may own, let alone limit the amount of ammunition the people may own or the size of the magazines the people may use, which was the issue in the aforementioned dispute.)
The legitimate cultural/sociopolitical expressions of human nature do not and cannot violate the rights of others. As natural rights are inalienable and, thus, absolute, they do not cease to exist when one steps into the public arena.
Cultural Marxists, pc space cadets and multiculturalists, don't have the right to not be offended. There's no such thing. The essence of liberty is ideological discrimination/dissent. The only right leftists, especially the atheists among them, exercise when they vie to suppress the legitimate cultural/sociopolitical expressions of human nature via governmentally imposed civil rights/protections beyond the fundamental concerns of political rights is that of might.
(2) The right of the people, indeed, the duty of the people, to overthrow usurpative government.
The latter is an idolatrous usurpation of God's rightful place and the prerogatives of free will. Judeo-Christianity emphasizes the dignity of the individual over the mundane concerns of the collective. The right of revolt is the ultimate expression of the inalienable rights of the people and the ultimate check, backed by an armed citizenry, against usurpative government.
(3) The repudiation of the divine right of kings.
(4) The separation of church and state.
Surprise! The only legitimate rendition of this construct from the Reformation, carried over to the Enlightenment, is that of the Anglo-American tradition of classical liberalism extrapolated from the New Testament of the Bible! This constraint is exerted by the people against the state. It's not the other way around, as the bulk of the Continental European thinkers of the Enlightenment would have it.
Rousseau's/Hegel's bastardized, collectivistic construct of separation (that espoused by the pitchfork-wielding Jacobins of the French Revolution and the mindless Bolsheviks of the Russian Revolution) and the Anglo-American construct of separation of the Republic of the United States of America are not the same thing.
Lefty doesn't separate church and state. Rather, Lefty vies to impose his "church" as he conflates the distinction between the common/neutral concerns of civil government with his collectivist penchant for the mobocratic rule of normative relativism/secular humanism. Essentially, Lefty's church is the state schools, and the leftward-leaning teachers and professors thereof are his church's priests and priestesses. Further, Lefty's construct of public accommodation, which conflates the distinction between the benign morphological traits/features of nature with the ideological/behavioral inclinations of some is his missionary outreach, the program by which he vies to condition Americans to accept the suppression of the prerogatives of free-association and private property.
