O Lord, I would love to go back to the original meaning. I was taught in grade school that the literary "man" meant both man and woman.

I am so tired of all the politically correct speech!!!

Frankly, I've never had a contextual problem with the word. If we're using your example of "all men are created equal", I take that to mean all of mankind are created equal. I have never confused that with the men's room. I feel that those who use the narrow definition are willfully ignorant, and those who want to overturn our vocabulary are just as bad...seemingly, just wanting something to complain about. If in fact we were to change our vocabulary, making it somehow entirely gender neutral, it would achieve exactly nothing.

And we should perhaps also clarify what "equal" means. It should simply mean "equal before the law", or :having equal access and opportunity.:

But it should NOT, and it CANNOT mean equal abilities,intelligence, energy, skills, characteristics, weaknesses, outcomes, successes, compensation, health or wealth. This ambiguity is behind most of the political and social strife in American history.

The words "freedom" and "rights" could also stand some clarification.

IMHO, the phrase "all men are created equal" in the Declaration of Independence had nothing to do with race or gender. Recall the Declaration was an open letter to King George III redressing grievances and declaring the independence of the colonies from British rule. Specifically, the rule of the king and his tyrannical monarchy. The Founding Fathers had a plan to create a constitutional republic and to do that they had to eliminate the monarchy in the colonies and to get the people to understand what was afoot and what was at stake. The phrase was an assault on the "divine right of kings" and was to end once and for all the notion of royal and common blood by birth. There would be no royal titles, no dynasties, and no rule by birth in the new nation. All men would be equal, meaning no royal class.

I recall reading the phrase was anathema in the House of Lords and encouraged even more resolve to crush the American rebellion. The phrase was a royal poke in the eye to the royals and was quite personal. American rebellion to break away from the British Crown was one thing, but the destruction of Royalty entirely was seen as an abomination that had to be extinguished.

In time the phrase would take on more meaning to include race and gender, but this is where it started. There is some contemporary hoopla regarding how can a slave holder pen such a phrase and not be a hypocrite. Well, now you know how.

If you are old enough to remember when schools took education seriously, you may remember being taught that the 'default' noun or pronoun when referring to two or more genders or to a person or people of an unknown gender was the masculine.

Since then 'gender neutrality' has largely replaced these age-old conventions.

It is important to read documents in their proper time context.

Yes! . "man" in this context means mankind, IMHO. -- j

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Dear Jan,

You commit the sin of all Liberals and Progressives, taking Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin's thoughts and writings out of historical context and literally.

May, June, and July of 1775 were vastly different times, times that none of America's Progressives, who began to rise a hundred years later, would have understood or been able to survive in. There was no "Social Safety Net" there were very few public charities, and they were religiously based.

When asked the question you've posed in 1922, Oliver Wendell Holmes said: "Men, spoken plurally, in a grander context refers to all mankind, as surly as Locke must have intended." Today the PC Police would cite me because I didn't say 'Humankind' to denote lack of gender or other multicultural identifier.

What most fail to realize is that Progressivism is like Socialism, unlike Objectivism, it all about the control of the masses by the selected few pure progressives or socialists.

Of course. It is only those who would divide us who separate mankind by "race" (we're the human race), sex (we're mankind), origin, income, and in so many other ways by which they hope to pit us against each other.

The only time i use PC term is in the sentence: "Politically correct is an oxymoron. You are either political or you are correct." As for me, i'm correct.

Actually my favorite phrase in the Declaration of Independence (perhaps my all time favorite phrase) follows: "To ensure these rights governments are instituted among men."

Hello jlc,
A fantastic thread. So many good contributions.
O.A.

Doubt government institution anyone would argue with your broadest definition of the word.

I suppose if we really think it is ambiguous, it is worth defining and correcting. Maybe we could, at last, get a unanimous decision by SCOTUS!

Kind of view this like the Washington Redskins name, a non-issue, unless we belabor it. Of course in either case, I am not in the category offended or previously oppressed, and perhaps overlook remaining biases.

I can't even get a rise out of my daughter, teasing her that she need to learn to cook because she is a woman. The flicker of truth necessary for humor, and below offense, is absent from the statement in her mind.

“The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.”-Aristotle

I think it is reasonable to hold that all men are CREATED / BORN equal…. with identical individual rights….at least in the USA.

Foremost among those are the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Certainly both our Declaration of Independence and Constitution support this concept of equality.

However, I think that in reality, there is no equality postpartum….primarily because the child’s genes begin to express individuality by responding to the baby’s environment, almost immediately…..of course that's only if there are no defects in that baby.

And while all people in this country should be entitled the same protection under the law as guaranteed by the Constitution, the notion that all men ARE equal, and have a RIGHT to equal results in life, is one of the most idiotic socialist concepts ever formed. Where we are in life has always been about the choices we’ve made “along-the-way”. But the notion that people in this country have a “right” to equal results in life is simply absurd. Such a notion ultimately leads to altruism and provides an irrefutable excuse to parents, and the child, to justify not learning and not working…….. and therefore…… removes all pride in self-improvement and achievement.

This leads to concepts such as “amorphous guilt”…. "white privilege"…. "women's rights" …

……….and spawns erroneous concepts such as ”victim mentality” and “social justice”…….and, of late….. “income inequality”.

A most recent example involves commentators on ABC urging mothers to not read to their children because it isn’t fair to the children whose parents don't read to them. Absurd? Insane??? Yes!!!!!!!!!!….but it happened!

Another is Obama’s recent “re-distribution-of-wealth-justification” rhetoric that successful businessmen are society’s lottery winners…. …as if success in business is totally random…..and…… as if it was somehow “unfair” that some people are successful, while others are not.

Can anybody honestly be this out-of-touch with reality?

“Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others. ” – Ayn Rand…

Karl Marx suggested “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”.

It would appear that Obama is simply attempting the implementation of Marx’s suggestion.

Here’s your sign!

Obama: Successful Businessmen Are 'Society's Lottery Winners'

Published May 13, 2015

Jan

I believe that your ascertain is correct. In my uneducated reading of many philosophy book I find for instance King James bible written with men dominance in mind and until more was discovered in the dead sea scrolls now we know women played large rolls in Jesus teaching and life(if one believes). Our fore father's were Christian. I also see Plato and Aristotle in our fore father's work which seems to have male hiarchy dominance.

As I read Ayn Rand work's I've always interpreted man or men as all people and also all other works even though the authors had other meaning. I see we are all in this together.

Inasmuch as slavery has existed since the dawn of humankind and all races have been enslaved by someone and since before we were an independent nation some of the most brutal slaveOWNERS were black; getoverit. Only 84 years after we became a nation slavery was abolished. That doesn't make us perfect but it shows we were and still are a better people than most of the world.

Want to own a slave today, go to most any country governed by sharia.

Have a great Independence Day.

The short answer is: yes.

This is one of the reasons my wife (a linguistics graduate) doesn't like English. There are far too many similar words with enough nuance of meaning (and of which meanings have changed substantially over the years) for it to be a precise language.

I personally believe that when the Declaration of Independence was written, "man" meant mankind - not just "free white males". Thus the "man" used in that document would be gender- and race-neutral.

I thought "men" in the Declaration of Independence referred to men and women who owned property. Only males could vote at that time, but Jefferson might have understood that women deserved the right.

I always accepted the designation in context of Man or Mankind, meant all human beings, both sexes and regardless of color or stature. However, as I have discovered in my integrated research that not all 'Men' (mankind) are not human (conscious human beings) in the same sense as the majority, so I use the term hu-man-oid; which indicates the lack of 'being', the lack of an 'I' or identity and the lack of conscience.

Jefferson and Franklin would have been steeped in Aristotle's logic. Given the precision of their writings, specially Jefferson, It is impossible to believe that he deliberately used the universal "All men are created equal..." rather than the conditional "Some men are created equal..."

I suspect they weren't thinking that much about it. It's like working on a prototype, where you're just focused on getting the thing working. You know at some point it will have be made safe, reliable, manfacturable, testable, and be made from parts available in production quantities. But at the early stage, you're just trying to prove the concept.

Following this model, they key innovation was a real working democratic republic where power flows from the citizens to the gov't, not the other way around.

In my own language, I use "people" and "humankind" instead "men" and "mankind" because they don't invite confusion about where I literally mean males or people in general.