Editor's Note: This column was co-authored by Bob Morrison.
Comedian Chris Rock has stoked the flames of controversy with this Fourth of July tweet. The Hollywood comic wrote: "Happy white peoples independence day the slaves weren't free but I'm sure they enjoyed fireworks." Rock's tweet sparked plenty of day-after fireworks. What he wrote went beyond the pale, responded many online, hurt and enraged at Rock's bitter humor.
Chris Rock's tweet was beyond the pale. It was doubtless his effort to capitalize on the 160th anniversary of that great Fifth of July speech delivered by black abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Douglass addressed a huge audience in Rochester, New York on July 5, 1852 on the theme: "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?"
Douglass' eloquent appeal was filled with "Rocky" barbs. Like this one: "I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary!" Within the pale was not a phrase lost on his mostly pale listeners. They may have laughed at the double entendre, but not for long.
Frederick turned his withering scorn on the very idea of a celebration of liberty in the midst of so much bondage and misery. "The blessings in which you this day rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. To drag a man in fetters...to join you in joyous anthems [is] inhuman mockery...This Fourth of July is yours, not mine...You may rejoice, I must mourn."
It was one of the most powerful speeches ever delivered in America. And Frederick Douglass used the Fourth of July to educate and illuminate the controversy over slavery in America. So, yes, Chris Rock, you were right to use the Fourth of July and a bitter humor to prick our consciences on Independence Day. We do not want the deeper meaning of this important day to grow as stale as left-over potato salad. We need this day to remind us of our nation's commitment to an ideal of life and liberty. The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time.
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Abraham Lincoln spoke to America in the 1850s, too. He, too, jarred our consciences. Lincoln had to deal with Supreme Court rulings adverse to liberty and antithetical to the nation's founding ideals. Lincoln spoke to mostly pale audiences when he described the plight of the black man.
All the powers of earth seem rapidly combining against him. Mammon is after him; ambition follows, and philosophy follows, and the Theology of the day is fast joining the cry. They have him in his prison house; they have searched his person, and left no prying instrument with him. One after another they have closed the heavy iron doors upon him, and now they have him, as it were, bolted in with a lock of a hundred keys, which can never be unlocked without the concurrence of every key; the keys in the hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a hundred different and distant places; and they stand musing as to what invention, in all the dominions of mind and matter, can be produced to make the impossibility of his escape more complete than it is.
Today, we search for those keys to escape the coils of Obamacare.
Lincoln knew better than to excoriate whites as whites, but instead sought to arouse them to their duty by reminding them of the high ideals that motivated the Founders.
In their [the Founders'] enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on and degraded and imbruted by its fellows. They grasped not only the whole race of men, then living, but they reached forward and seized upon the farthest posterity. They erected a beacon to guide their children and their children's children, and the countless myriads who should inhabit the earth in other ages. Wise statesmen as they were, they knew the tendency of prosperity to breed tyrants, and so they established these great self-evident truths, that when, in the distant future, some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, not but white men, or none but Anglo-Saxon white men were entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, their posterity might look up again to the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began, so that truth and justice and mercy and all the humane and Christian Virtues might not be extinguished from the land; so that no man hereafter would dare to limit and circumscribe the great principles on which the Temple of Liberty was being built.
We are now told by the Supreme Court of our day that millions have come to "rely" on abortion and therefore we must accept it. But did not millions then "rely" on slavery? Today, 71% of pregnancies in Harlem end in abortion. For those who view the fate of unborn children as "above their pay grade," that 71% pre-natal death rate is not enough.
Today, Obamacare threatens to trample liberty underfoot in its drive to force acceptance of abortion on Catholic and non-Catholic institutions that try to defend innocent human lives.
What was wrong in slavery is what is wrong in abortion: It denies to members of our human family their rightful place at the national celebration of the Glorious Fourth. It says we will celebrate as your lives ebb away. It says we know what TIME's Joe Klein writes is true: "That thing in the womb is human." But we will look away. As we contemplate the nation's birthday, we should ask ourselves: Doesn't everyone deserve a birth day?
Lincoln said it well: If slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong. We agree. And if abortion is not wrong, then nothing is wrong. So tweet, Chris Rock, and don't let us forget the tragedy that was American bondage. And join us, we appeal to you, join us in opposition to abortion.
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