Rep. Ayanna Pressley – (Getty Images/Alex Wong)
On the Fourth of July, Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) marked Independence Day by tweeting an article from the progressive news outlet Salon, condemning the Declaration of Independence because the document “did not condemn slavery, protect the rights of women or include Native Americans.”
In her post, Rep. Pressley tweets an article, entitled “Fourth of July’s Ugly Truth: The Declaration of Independence is Sexist, Racist and Prejudiced,” quoting its criticism of the nation’s Founding Fathers:
“Our Founding Fathers were not the living gods that many believe them to be. They were fallible human beings, and some of their flaws had terrible consequences for people who were not fortunate enough to be born into privileged groups.”
Controversial Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) both “liked” and shared Pressley’s post on her Twitter page.
In her Twitter thread, Rep. Pressley argued that the “prejudices, biases & contradictions codified by our founding fathers is still felt today.” She continued to compare the detention of migrants awaiting trial to slavery, writing that “We continue to struggle as a nation to embrace our full history, one that includes family separation of black families at the auction block & today of migrants at camps.”
Writing for The Daily Wire, Josh Hammer rebuked the article, saying that its author was “profoundly ungrateful” and “affirmatively wrong to muddle and belittle the genius that was Thomas Jefferson’s drafted Declaration of Independence.”
Hammer added that the Declaration of Independence actually laid the foundation for the extermination of slavery:
“Slavery was not in any way a tenet of the American Founding; it was an institution manifestly athwart the Founding. The sagacity of the Declaration, in fact, was that it actually laid the seeds — the very codified foundation — for the eventual eradication of that most horrific of compromises of principle.”
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