Lightning and Thunder Take Time

Americans who call themselves conservative tell the last two hundred and fifty years as a fall from the founding. Americans who call themselves progressive tell the same years as the founding’s promise slowly kept. The two accounts disagree about which way the country has moved and agree that 1776 is the standard to measure it by. This paper argues that each account has half of the story right, the conservative that the country has come apart and the progressive that it came apart by applying the founding’s own principles, and that the two halves together convict the principle. Modern America is not a departure from 1776. It is 1776, arriving.

Two stories, one standard

On July 5, 1926, at the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Calvin Coolidge told a crowd in Philadelphia that its principles could not be improved upon. “If all men are created equal, that is final,” he said. “If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.” A man who denied them, Coolidge went on, could only move backward, and such men were reactionaries whose ideas were “not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.”

That is still the conservative account. The President’s Advisory 1776 Commission restated it in January 2021, treating Progressivism as a departure from the founding that held truths to be relative to their age. On this account the founding was right, the country later left it, and the remedy is to go back.

The progressive account keeps the same calendar and reads it in the other direction. Writing for the Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), Justice Anthony Kennedy said that the generations who wrote the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment “did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all of its dimensions, and so they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning.” On this account the founding made a promise its authors could not see to the end, the country has been learning its meaning ever since, and the remedy is to keep going.

The two accounts disagree about direction and agree about the standard, and neither asks whether the standard itself produced what the conservative mourns and the progressive celebrates. We have argued that left and right measure one axis of political disagreement and that a second axis explains more of it, whether authority answers to consent. On that second axis both accounts stand in the same place, and we call the place liberalism, the order that grounds authority in the consent of the governed and treats liberty as freedom from any rule a man has not chosen. This paper asks what that principle has done with the time it has been given. Stated as a syllogism, the case runs as follows.

Lightning and thunder

In 1882 Friedrich Nietzsche published a parable about a madman who lit a lantern on a bright morning and ran into a marketplace crying that he was looking for God. The people standing about did not believe in God, and they laughed at him. He told them that they had killed God, all of them together, and asked whether they understood what they had done, whether the earth had come loose from its sun and whether it was not growing colder. They stared at him in silence, and he threw his lantern to the ground.

The deed, he added, was still further from them than the furthest star, “and yet they have done it!” We do not quote Nietzsche as an authority. He hated the faith and wrote to destroy it, and we quote him because he saw what the unbelievers in his marketplace had missed, that a people can commit an act and go on living for generations as though it had not, because the consequences of a deed travel more slowly than the deed. The men laughing at the madman had stopped believing in God and assumed nothing else would change, and since their morals and their institutions were still standing, they took the standing for proof that the ground was sound.

Scripture said it long before Nietzsche and gave it a meaning he could not. In the Sermon on the Mount Christ gave the rule for judging what grows from a root, “A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit” (Matt. 7:18), and closed the sermon with two houses, one built on rock and one on sand. The house on sand stands until the weather comes: “And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it” (Matt. 7:27). A house on a bad foundation does not fall when the foundation is poured. It falls when the storm finds it, and every year of fair weather before then looks like evidence that the foundation was good.

Hosea describes the same delay in political terms. God said of the northern kingdom, “They have made kings for themselves, but not by me,” and then, “they sowed blighted seed, and their destruction shall await them” (Hos. 8:4, 7). The seed was blighted when it went into the ground, and the destruction waited for the harvest. Paul states the rule behind both texts: “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap” (Gal. 6:7). The warning against deception is there because of the delay, since the season between sowing and reaping is the season in which a man can believe he has sown nothing.

Where Nietzsche saw only physics, Scripture sees patience. Peter answered men who took the delay of judgment as proof that none was coming, who said that “since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were,” and he told them why it waits: “The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance” (2 Pet. 3:4, 9). The time between the lightning and the thunder is not empty. It is given for turning back, and a people that spends it insisting nothing has happened has wasted it.

Adams heard it coming

The thunder could be heard in 1776 by anyone who listened for it, and John Adams did. In May of that year James Sullivan of Massachusetts wrote to him proposing changes in the qualifications of voters, on the ground that laws touching every man’s life and liberty bind those who cannot vote as well as those who can. Adams, who a few weeks later would sit on the committee appointed to draft the Declaration, answered on May 26 that the theory was correct and that he could not see where it would stop. “It is certain in theory,” he wrote, “that the only moral foundation of government is the consent of the people. But to what an extent shall we carry this principle?” The questions that followed went straight to the household, asking by what right the old bind the young without their consent and, in his words, “Whence arises the right of the men to govern women, without their consent?”

He had no answer from the principle, only prudential ones: women were occupied with the care of their children, children lacked judgment, and men without property would vote as some man of property directed them. “Wisdom and policy,” he concluded, counseled against altering the qualifications of voters for now, and then he said what would follow if anyone did.

Every claim Adams named arrived, and each arrived the way he feared, through the principle he had granted. The property qualifications he defended fell state by state over the nineteenth century, and in Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections (1966) the Supreme Court answered the man without a farthing in constitutional terms: “Wealth, like race, creed, or color, is not germane to one’s ability to participate intelligently in the electoral process.” The Nineteenth Amendment, ratified in 1920, forbade denying the vote on account of sex, and the Twenty-sixth, ratified in 1971, lowered the voting age to eighteen, a hundred and ninety-five years after Adams predicted that the lads would come asking.

We cite these changes for what they prove, not to argue each one. Adams granted the principle and opposed its consequences, and the only weapon he had against them was prudence, the judgment that a change was unwise for now. Prudence has to win its argument again in every generation while a principle only has to wait, and a principle that can be limited only by prudence is not limited.

Abraham Lincoln, the founding’s most eloquent heir, described the same mechanism as a design. Answering the Dred Scott decision in 1857, he argued that the Declaration’s equality reached the slave, and that its authors had meant to set up “a standard maxim for free society,” one “constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence.” Coolidge called the propositions final. Lincoln called them a standard the country would keep approaching and never reach, and the courts have followed Lincoln, since a maxim built to spread and deepen does not stop where its first readers would have stopped it.

Where the thunder fell

We ask three questions of every idea: where it came from, what truth has been twisted to produce it, and where it leads. Our paper None Gives What He Has Not answered the first for the idea that authority comes from the consent of the governed, tracing it from the schools into the American founding. This paper follows the idea forward. The steps below are the ones that remade marriage, the household, and the law’s protection of the unborn, and at every step the men who took it gave their reasons, which were the founding’s own.

The first step came before the Constitution existed. In his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), Jefferson argued that “our rulers can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them,” that the rights of conscience were never submitted, and that “the legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” The argument runs straight from consent. Government holds only what the governed handed over, conduct that injures no one else was never handed over, and so the law has no claim on it. Jefferson applied the rule to worship, but nothing in the rule confines it there.

Locke had already asked the question that no-fault divorce would answer. In the Second Treatise (1689) he wondered why the conjugal compact, once the children were raised and the inheritance provided for, “may not be made determinable, either by consent, or at a certain time, or upon certain conditions, as well as any other voluntary compacts,” since he saw “no necessity in the nature of the thing” that it should last for life (§81). If marriage is a compact like other compacts, consent makes it, and the end of consent can end it. California’s Family Law Act of 1969, signed by Governor Ronald Reagan, made that the law: its courts would dissolve a marriage for “irreconcilable differences” that had caused its “irremediable breakdown,” with no proof that either spouse had done wrong, and every other state followed, New York last in 2010. The right to alter or abolish, which the Declaration claimed against a king, had reached the home.

Adams’s question about the household received its answer in Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972). Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) had protected the use of contraceptives by married couples on the ground of marital privacy, and Eisenstadt extended the right to the unmarried, explaining that the marriage could not be the unit the right belonged to, since “the marital couple is not an independent entity with a mind and heart of its own, but an association of two individuals each with a separate intellectual and emotional makeup.” Adams had asked by what right men govern women without their consent, and he assumed a household that a man could represent. Two centuries later the Court found no household to represent, only two individuals who had agreed to associate.

Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) gave the principle its fullest statement. The joint opinion of Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy, and David Souter reaffirmed the right to abortion on the ground that “at the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” The sentence had been waiting since 1789, when Jefferson wrote to Madison that the living “are masters too of their own persons, and consequently may govern them as they please.” A man who is master of his own person and may govern it as he pleases defines his own existence, and a law that tells him what his existence means governs him without his consent.

Kennedy also wrote the Court’s opinions in Lawrence v. Texas (2003) and Obergefell, which applied the rule to sex and then to marriage. Lawrence drew its line where Jefferson drew his, observing that the case did not involve minors, “persons who might be injured or coerced,” or relationships “where consent might not easily be refused,” so that injury and consent were the only questions left. The opinion added that it did not decide whether the government must formally recognize such relationships, and twelve years later Obergefell decided that it must. Kennedy explained why it did not matter that the framers never foresaw the result. Those who ratified the due process clauses, he wrote, “did not presume to have this insight. They knew times can blind us to certain truths and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress.” In Obergefell he described a method that “respects our history and learns from it without allowing the past alone to rule the present.” That is Lincoln’s maxim, constantly approximated, written into the reasoning of the Court, and the conservative who calls these decisions a betrayal of the founders has to explain why they argued from the founders’ principle and from Lincoln’s account of how it would grow.

What truth it twists

An error that lasts is built from a truth. None Gives What He Has Not showed how the founding turned the equal worth of every man, who bears God’s image, into an equal claim to rule, so that no man may govern another without his consent, while Scripture holds the first and denies the second in a single verse: “Honour all men. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honour the king” (1 Pet. 2:17). The genealogy in this paper runs on two more truths, liberty and happiness, and the founding twisted both.

Liberty. Scripture speaks of liberty constantly, and always as release from one master into the service of another. “Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin,” Christ said, and “if the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed” (John 8:34, 36). Paul told the Romans that a man is the servant of whatever he obeys, “whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness” (Rom. 6:16), and Peter told Christians to live “as free, and not using your liberty for a cloke of maliciousness, but as the servants of God” (1 Pet. 2:16). A free man in Scripture is a man released from sin into obedience. The founding kept the word and changed what a man is freed from. Liberty became freedom from any rule a man has not consented to, and since the rule of God is not one a man consents to, a liberty defined that way ends, sooner or later, where Casey ended it, in a freedom whose only content is whatever each person supplies.

Happiness. The Declaration lists “the pursuit of happiness” among the unalienable rights and leaves its object undefined. Scripture defines it. One psalm describes a people whose children grow like plants, whose garners are full and whose oxen are fat, but whose mouth has spoken vanity, and then corrects the reader: “Men bless the people to whom this lot belongs, but blessed is the people whose God is the Lord” (Ps. 143:15). Christ opened the Sermon on the Mount with the same correction, calling blessed the poor in spirit, the mourners, and the meek (Matt. 5:3–5), none of whom is happy by the world’s measure, and in the Greek of both texts the word is makarios, the ordinary word for happy. In Scripture happiness is received from God on his terms. In the Declaration it is pursued, and the one pursuing sets the terms. As late as 1923 the Court still filled the phrase with inherited content, as section 06 shows, and when the inheritance ran out the phrase meant what its grammar had always allowed, that each man chases what he takes his happiness to be and the law keeps the road clear.

Why it took two hundred years

If the principle was complete in 1776, the obvious question is why its consequences took two centuries to arrive. The founding generation knew nothing like no-fault divorce, its states punished blasphemy and sodomy, and several of them taxed their citizens to support churches. The delay has an explanation, and the founding’s own spokesmen supplied it.

Alexis de Tocqueville toured the country in 1831 and concluded that its laws did not restrain Americans and its religion did. “If the mind of the Americans were free from all trammels,” he wrote, “they would very shortly become the most daring innovators and the most implacable disputants in the world,” and he named what held them back: “Thus whilst the law permits the Americans to do what they please, religion prevents them from conceiving, and forbids them to commit, what is rash or unjust.” The restraint was in the people rather than the principle. It came from churches, households, and a common law formed under the older order that the founding set aside, and the founding inherited it the way an heir inherits a house he did not build.

The founders knew it. John Adams told a brigade of the Massachusetts militia in 1798 that “we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion,” and that “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” The second sentence reads like praise of the Constitution and is an admission. The order could not produce the people it required, and it could only borrow them from institutions its own principle did not support.

Coolidge made the same admission in the speech that called the propositions final. The Declaration’s principles, he said, “have their source and their roots in the religious convictions,” and “unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish.” The forecast was half right. The faith did not endure, and the principles did not perish. The restraint perished, and the principles, released from it, did what Adams had said they would do.

The principle also worked against its own inheritance from the start. In the same letter to Madison, Jefferson took it as “self evident” that “the earth belongs in usufruct to the living,” that the dead “have neither powers nor rights over it,” and that every constitution and every law “naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right.” Under consent each generation owes the last nothing it did not agree to. Scripture says the opposite: “Remove not the old landmarks, which thy fathers placed” (Prov. 22:28). Where the fathers’ landmarks bind, an inheritance can last for centuries. Where they bind only by the heirs’ consent, it lasts as long as the heirs feel like keeping it.

The Supreme Court’s own language shows the inheritance running out. In Meyer v. Nebraska (1923) the Court described the liberty the Constitution protects as including the right “to marry, establish a home and bring up children, to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience, and generally to enjoy those privileges long recognized at common law as essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.” The liberty is the founding’s and its content is borrowed, from marriage, the home, children, God, and the common law. Sixty-nine years later Casey used the same word with nothing left to borrow and defined liberty as the right to define existence. Nothing in the principle changed between 1923 and 1992. What changed was how much of the inheritance remained to fill it.

The institutions that produced the restraint lost their public standing one at a time. The First Amendment barred a national church, the states disestablished their own, Massachusetts last in 1833, and in Everson v. Board of Education (1947) the Supreme Court applied the Establishment Clause to the states and declared that the wall between church and state “must be kept high and impregnable.” An order that admitted it was made only for a religious people spent a century and a half walling off the institution that made people religious.

Why conservatism cannot stop it

Every conservative defense in this history has had the same shape. Adams opposed widening the franchise as unwise “in these times.” Locke kept the husband’s rule in the household on the ground that it falls to the man “as the abler and the stronger” (§82), which is a claim about strength rather than the duty of an office, and a claim equality could dispute. Chief Justice John Roberts dissented from Obergefell on the ground that the question should “rest with the people acting through their elected representatives” rather than with “five lawyers,” and he told the decision’s supporters not to celebrate the Constitution, since “it had nothing to do with it.” The constitutional text may have had nothing to do with it. The founding’s principle had everything to do with it, and Roberts’s own ground was that principle, that the people decide. None of these defenses denied the principle. Each conceded it and asked for an exception or for a different body to apply it, and each lost the way section 03 found Adams losing.

The parties’ records follow the same shape. The first no-fault divorce law was signed by a Republican governor. The joint opinion in Casey was written by three justices appointed by Republican presidents, O’Connor and Kennedy by Reagan and Souter by George H. W. Bush, and Kennedy wrote Lawrence and Obergefell as well. We cite these facts to show that the results did not depend on which party held power, not to charge anyone with bad faith. Men appointed by presidents of the right reached them by reasoning from the principles both parties hold.

The conservative legal movement’s largest victory shows the same thing from the other side. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) the Court overruled Roe and Casey and closed its opinion with the words “We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives.” The decision did not say that the unborn are protected by the law of God. It said the people decide. That November, Michigan voters amended their constitution to establish a right to “reproductive freedom” that includes abortion, approving it with 56.7 percent of the vote. The Court that conservatives had worked for half a century to build returned the question to the principle, and the principle answered.

Coolidge said that anyone who denied the propositions could only go backward. The country did not go backward. It went where the propositions pointed, and the men who called them final had no ground from which to stop it, because the propositions were the ground. A conservative who defends 1776 against modern America is defending the lightning against the thunder.

What the Christian does instead

The conservative remedy is a return to 1776, and the genealogy shows why it cannot work, since a return to the root grows the same tree. The remedy is to go back further, to the authority the founding set aside. Coolidge called the men who rejected his propositions reactionaries, holders of ideas “more ancient” than the fathers’, and we accept the description. The old paths are older than any founding, and Jeremiah told Judah to ask for them (Jer. 6:16). What that means in practice runs through four places: the man himself, his home, his church, and his public life.

Personally. He stops measuring by 1776. When he asks whether a law or a custom is right, the question is not whether the founders would have approved of it but whether God commands or forbids it, and when he speaks of liberty he means what Peter meant, freedom used “as the servants of God” (1 Pet. 2:16). He seeks first the kingdom of God and his righteousness (Matt. 6:33), not a happiness he defines for himself, and he repents of the pursuit of happiness wherever it has become his creed.

In the home. He treats marriage as a vow made before God and not a compact held open by consent, since “what therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder” (Matt. 19:6). He holds his place in the household as an office received from God, and he teaches his children God’s law as Moses commanded, “sitting in the house, and walking by the way, and lying down, and rising up” (Deut. 6:7). The restraint Tocqueville saw was made in homes like that, and it will not be remade anywhere else.

In the church. He asks for the whole law to be preached, the Fifth Commandment included as the root of every human authority, and he stops treating the Declaration from the pulpit as though it were a Christian confession. The church is older than the republic and will outlast it, and it has no reason to borrow the republic’s creed.

In public life. He argues from God’s law and not from the founding. When he tells a ruler that the killing of the unborn is murder, he says so because God forbids it, not because the Constitution is silent, since the argument from silence concedes that the people may decide, and Michigan has shown what the people decide. The second Psalm addresses rulers, and judges by name: “Now therefore understand, ye kings: be instructed, all ye that judge the earth. Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice in him with trembling” (Ps. 2:10–11). Whatever a reader concludes about the ballot, which our companion papers take up, the argument he carries into public life has to begin with the authority of God, or it begins with the principle that produced the thunder.

Six objections

“The same principle ended slavery.” This is the strongest objection. Lincoln and the abolitionists appealed to the Declaration’s equality against slavery, so the principle this paper blames for modern America also freed the slaves. The objection fails because emancipation did not need the twist. Scripture condemned the trade on which American slavery was built long before 1776, numbering “menstealers” among those the law is made for, and the same sentence names “murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers” and “them that defile themselves with mankind” (1 Tim. 1:9–10). The verse that condemns the slave-trader condemns, in the same breath, the conduct Lawrence protected and the unions Obergefell required every state to license. Scripture’s equality, which is equal worth before God, condemns both. The founding’s equality, which is equal authority, condemned the first and in time protected the second. A principle that reached the right answer about slavery and the wrong one about sex and marriage did not reach the first by being true. Where it agreed with Scripture it was borrowing from the truth it twisted, and where it went past Scripture it was following the twist.

“Correlation is not causation.” The Pill, the automobile, industrial wages, Darwin, and two world wars changed American life more than any court did, and the objection says this paper mistakes a sequence for a cause. We grant that those forces supplied occasions. They did not supply justifications. The Pill made contraception easy, and it took a court to decide that the law could not touch it, which the Court did on the ground that the individual, married or single, is the bearer of the right. A cause that supplies the reason a change becomes law is not an incidental cause. The genealogy in section 04 rests on the reasons the deciders gave, in their own words, and not on the order of the dates.

“The founders meant liberty under God.” Most of the founders belonged to churches, and almost none of them would have approved of Casey or Obergefell. We grant both points. This paper concerns what their principle contained, not what they intended, and Adams, as devout and as cautious as any of them, saw in 1776 that the principle contained more than he wanted and could only plead against its extension. Intentions die with the men who hold them, and principles do not. A man can perform an act whose meaning he does not grasp, and the meaning arrives anyway.

“Progressivism broke with the founding.” The 1776 Report presents Progressivism as a doctrine that rejected the Declaration’s truths and put group rights, “constantly redefined,” in place of natural rights. The charge fits Woodrow Wilson. It does not fit the decisions that remade marriage and the household. Eisenstadt protected “the individual, married or single.” Casey protected each person’s right to define existence. Lawrence and Obergefell protected individual liberty and appealed to the framers’ own modesty about its extent. None of them argued from group rights or from the relativity of truth. They argued from individual liberty, consent, and harm, which is to say from 1776, and a graft takes only on a stock that will receive it.

“Dobbs proves the order can correct itself.” Section 07 answers this. Dobbs corrected a court and left the principle untouched, returning the question “to the people and their elected representatives,” and in Michigan the people answered within five months. A correction that moves a moral question from nine judges to the electorate leaves it where the founding put every question, in the will of the governed, and the result then depends on what the governed have become.

“Every order decays.” Every civilization declines, the objection says, and sin explains the decline better than any theory. We agree that sin explains it. Romans 1 describes the pattern, in which men “changed the truth of God into a lie” and God gave them up to what they had chosen (Rom. 1:24–28). The claim of this paper is narrower. An order decays either by departing from its principle or by fulfilling it, and the American order has done the second. At each step the change was argued in the order’s own terms, from liberty, equality, and consent, by the officers charged with keeping them. That is not the decay of an order that abandoned its foundation. It is the weather finding the foundation.

Where the argument stops

It does not judge the founders’ faith or motives. Many of them would have recoiled from modern America, and the argument concerns what their principle contained, not what they wanted.

It does not condemn every change since 1776. The end of man-stealing was a good, and Scripture taught it first.

It does not argue each extension of the franchise. Section 03 cites them as proof that the principle has no stopping point, not as a list of separate wrongs.

It does not depend on a verdict about the war of 1776. It concerns the principles the Declaration stated and the conclusions later drawn from them.

It does not make the American government illegitimate. The powers that be are ordained of God (Rom. 13:1), this one included, and nothing here counsels resistance.

It does not deny that other forces shaped modern America. It claims that the founding’s principle supplied the reasons by which those forces became law.

It stands or falls on the reasons. The figure in the title proves nothing by itself, since any theory can explain a delay after the fact, and the case rests on what the deciders said about why they decided as they did. If the decisive steps in section 04 rested on a principle the founding did not state, the genealogy breaks at that step, and a reader who rejects the conclusion should show it there.

Texts and editions

Lancelot C. L. Brenton, trans., The Septuagint with Apocrypha (London, 1851), for the Old Testament.

The Holy Bible, King James Version (1611), for the New Testament.

John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1689), Second Treatise §§81–82.

John Adams to James Sullivan, 26 May 1776, in Papers of John Adams 4:208–12.

Declaration of Independence (1776). Constitution of the United States, Amendments XIX (1920) and XXVI (1971).

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), Query XVII.

Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 6 September 1789, in Papers of Thomas Jefferson 15:392–97.

John Adams to the Officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts, 11 October 1798.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1 (1835), ch. 17, trans. Henry Reeve.

Abraham Lincoln, speech at Springfield, Illinois, 26 June 1857.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom (1882), §125, trans. Thomas Common (1910).

Calvin Coolidge, address on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Philadelphia, 5 July 1926.

The President’s Advisory 1776 Commission, The 1776 Report (January 2021), 12–13.

Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1923).

Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1 (1947).

Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965).

Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections, 383 U.S. 663 (1966).

California Family Law Act of 1969, effective 1 January 1970. New York Domestic Relations Law §170(7) (2010).

Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438 (1972).

Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992).

Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003).

Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015), opinion of the Court and dissent of Roberts, C.J.

Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215 (2022).

Michigan Proposal 22-3, general election of 8 November 2022, as certified by the Board of State Canvassers.

Published by Beyond Left and Right. The Old Testament is quoted from Brenton’s translation of the Septuagint and the New Testament from the King James Version. Adams is quoted with spelling and capitalization modernized. Nietzsche follows the Common translation in the Levy edition. Sullivan’s letter and the Commission’s report are paraphrased. Michigan’s vote share follows published reports of the certified canvass. Correspondence: contact@beyondleftandright.com