Bill of Rights unites nation, worth honoring in divisive times

Today, Dec. 15, is Bill of Rights Day — the 226th anniversary of this cornerstone of our free society.

In a testament to the power of its ideas, principles once considered radical, like freedom of expression, the presumption of innocence, due process and equality under the law, are now considered universal human rights. Yet today the Bill of Rights is barely taught in our schools, and all but invisible in our public squares.

MyBillofRights.org was created to help fill that void by putting monuments to the Bill of Rights on the grounds of all 50 state capitols. We dedicated the first such monument at the Arizona Capitol in Phoenix, where it quickly became a must-see attraction for tens of thousands of school children each year. That success led to the approval of three more projects — in Texas, Alabama and Oklahoma — with the California legislature set to consider a fourth early next year.

This year’s anniversary takes place against a backdrop of the most bitter political climate many Americans have ever experienced. Resembling nothing so much as a bad marriage, both sides repeatedly talk past each other, with neither willing to recognize their shared history or common values.

Worse, the most basic of facts about that shared history and those common values are now routinely called into question — not in the spirit of honest inquiry but as a tactic utilized to deepen the divide. Disingenuous and frequently dishonest debates rage about everything from justifications for the censoring of political speech on college campuses to the appropriateness of monuments to Confederate generals.

The Bill of Rights Monument Project is one answer to these divisions. These monuments are being created to bring Americans together to celebrate what’s truly exceptional about our country: that we are the first nation in history to be founded on such a set of ideas and principles.

This is not to say America has always adhered to these ideas and principles, let alone that our founders were visionary enough to transcend the history of their own times. But they did manage to put in place a truly revolutionary framework, one designed to blunt the worst aspects of human nature, such as the drive for power and dominion over others, and to strengthen its most noble human instinct: that every person has an equal right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Nothing bears out the continuing promise of this framework better than the history of the Bill of Rights itself. Written mostly by slave owners, its freedoms and principles only applied to roughly five percent of the people living in the United States when it was ratified in 1791. They didn’t apply to slaves, women, free blacks or Native Americans, or even to white men of less than a certain status and property.

And yet it contains not a single exclusionary phrase, so that as our expectation of freedom grew through the experience of it, along with the wrenching tragedy of a civil war and countless movements inspired by its promise of equality. This is its enduring genius.

The Bill of Rights was written at a time of divisions even greater than we face today. With nothing less than the fate of the new Constitution at stake, and likely the survival of the fledgling nation, the greatest minds of that generation demonstrated true leadership by reaching across that political divide to save the nation.

When completed, The Bill of Rights Monument Project will leave a legacy of unprecedented scope: a national network of monuments providing inspirational settings for millions of visitors to encounter and engage with the words and the freedoms and the principles in the Bill of Rights.

We hope you’ll join us in making this vision a reality, and we’ll all look forward to a dedication on the grounds of the Capitol in Frankfort.

This story was originally published December 14, 2017 at 6:55 PM with the headline "Bill of Rights unites nation, worth honoring in divisive times."