I am always stirred by the opening words of our Declaration of Independence, which constituted our traditional reading this morning. While the Declaration of Independence is hardly traditional to most religious services, it is traditional in the truest sense, namely of belonging to our tradition, both as Americans and as Unitarian Universalists. Thomas Jefferson wrote the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, which the Congress amended heavily, much to Jefferson’s irritation. Jefferson more than once expressed his Unitarianism, but his distance from the nearest Unitarian church and the preference of Southerners of his class for the establishment Episcopal communion kept him from being a Unitarian on the church roles. Jefferson not only straddled insider and outsider groups religiously but politically. What a juxtaposition between his life of privilege as a wealthy landowner, (and, regrettably, slave owner), and his hunted status as a revolutionary against Parliament and King George III! Jefferson once, while governor of Virginia, only narrowly escaped capture by the British Dragoons for his revolutionary activities.

The Declaration was a clear statement of rejection, by its subjects, of an empire that had crossed the line in its treatment of those who lay across an ocean from the capital and its rich, complacent, and often callous legislators. “No taxation without representation!” was a rallying cry of the patriots, and to prove it, a group of them, dressed as the original inhabitants of their land and cast a shipload of tea into Boston harbor in protest of social and economic injustice. They were known as the Sons of Liberty. Many of them were also part of the democratically constituted Freemasonic lodges. The Sons of Liberty, like the contemporary Black Bloc, often dressed in black and engaged in property destruction. What else were the secessionist members of such illegal groups as the Sons of Liberty and the United States Congress upset about? The Declaration, in its list of grievances against the king, calls for such rights as trial by jury, protection from murder by imperial military personnel, unjust prosecution outside the American colonies, against forced conscription into the king’s military, and, in general, against treatment as second class citizens in their own homeland.

Another revolutionary slogan was, “United We Stand, Liberty First!” Liberty was a key value to these rebels. Like the French revolutionaries, they signaled their support for the liberty they sought with the symbol of the liberty cap, which they borrowed from ancient Rome. In the Roman Empire, there were many slaves, who were often shown to be such by their shaved heads. When a slave was granted freedom, he could don a conical headpiece known as a “liberty cap,” symbolic of his status as a freedman. The liberty cap in the colonies was often displayed on a “liberty pole,” erected at places where the Sons of Liberty insurgents met and pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.

After the revolution was won, Jefferson was again in the forefront of advocating for individual rights. He insisted on a written Bill of Rights as part of the constitution, though many did not feel this was necessary. Jefferson, on the other hand, as one of the most learned persons of his generation, clearly saw the tendency of governments to squelch citizens’ liberties over time. In a letter to Noah Webster, Jefferson writes, "It had become an universal and almost uncontroverted position in the several States, that the purposes of society do not require a surrender of all our rights to our ordinary governors; that there are certain portions of right not necessary to enable them to carry on an effective government, and which experience has nevertheless proved they will be constantly encroaching on, if submitted to them; that there are also certain fences which experience has proved peculiarly efficacious against wrong, and rarely obstructive of right, which yet the governing powers have ever shown a disposition to weaken and remove. Of the first kind, for instance, is freedom of religion; of the second, trial by jury, habeas corpus laws, free presses."

Jefferson enumerates some of the most basic rights without which a society could hardly be called free: freedom of religion, trial by jury, habeas corpus, and a free press.

Taking each in order, people have a right to worship (or not worship) as their consciences dictate. At the time of the revolution, various states had their own established religions, a condition which survived, in some cases, into the next century. Jefferson made sure that the federal constitution prohibited a state religion for the new nation.

People have a right to a trial by a jury of their peers when accused of a crime. A central part of English law going back to the Magna Carta or Great Charter of 1215, the jury guarded the accused from verdicts that were dictated by the authorities. The jury also guards against unjust laws. I would venture that most Americans today are not aware of the extent of their power when called to jury service, a power which may ultimately prove to be more important than the vote for political office. By longstanding tradition, not only may a juror vote on the guilt or innocence of the defendant, he or she may refuse to hold the defendant accountable to a law the juror’s conscience deems unjust. This is called jury nullification. I would encourage you, before the next time you do jury service, to get information about jury nullification from The Fully Informed Jury Association.[1]

The court system generally does not make this information known to jurors and at least one person has been threatened with jail time for letting jurors know about this right. James Joseph Duane, in the journal Litigation, writes of a Nevada “50-year-old florist and grandmother [who] almost landed in prison for her efforts to help spread the word to jurors. When her son went on trial for drug charges in federal court, Yvonne Regas and a friend papered the windshields of nearby parked cars, hoping to let the jurors learn the completely unexpected fact that her son faced 450 years in prison for a single drug transaction nine years earlier. Federal authorities charged her with jury tampering and obstruction of justice, but eventually dropped the charges. Presumably, they gave up hope of figuring out how they could get jurors to convict her without showing them the contents of the pamphlets she had been distributing--and then her jury would know the truth about nullification.”[2]

To take another example, there are places in the South where no jury can be found to convict local farmers charged with growing marijuana. Enough of their peers do not consider it just that their neighbors be sent away to long prison terms for growing something not worse than the perfectly legal but deadly tobacco plant.

The same basic idea is being used as local communities around the nation, over 200 of them now, have enacted legislation against the USA PATRIOT ACT, which so many Americans see as a contradiction to our basic constitutional freedoms.

To return to Jefferson’s list, people have the right of habeas corpus. This was also a time-honored part of English law. It means that a person detained by authorities has the right to have a court consider the legality of their detention. Abraham Lincoln suspended the right of habeas corpus during the civil war. The Bush Administration, in its current War on Terror, had done much the same, but has recently been challenged by courts. Last month the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals declared, “Even in times of national emergency—indeed, particularly in such time—it is the obligation of the Judicial Branch to ensure the preservation of our constitutional values and to prevent the Executive Branch from running roughshod over the rights of citizens and aliens alike.” In their decision, the court held that those foreign nationals being held indefinitely by the government as “enemy combatants” at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base have the right to a court review of their imprisonment. The same day, another appeals court ruled that the President, acting alone, does not have the authority to detain US citizens as “enemy combatants.” Incidentally, the Constitution nowhere contains the words “alien” or “foreigner.” And, it only refers to citizenship in regard to eligibility for high office. The Bill of Rights does not speak of “citizens” and “non-citizens” but of “people.”

David Cole, in the current issue of The Nation magazine, writes:

We live in a time when our basic habeas corpus rights are in greater jeopardy than at any time since the US government confined its citizen of Japanese origin to concentration camps in the 1940’s.

The last basic right Jefferson named in his letter to Webster was that of a free press. That right was severely curtailed not long after the Constitution was adopted in the form of the Sedition Act of 1798, which criminalized criticism of the government. Specifically, the Act stated that anyone who “shall write, print, utter or publish” “false, scandalous and malicious” statements against the government of the United States. Fortunately for our democratic republic, the Act sunsetted when John Adams’ presidency ended and Jefferson’s began. But another Sedition Act, part of the Espionage Act of 1917, would succeed it over a century later.

When Eugene Debs was convicted under this later Sedition Act for making statements against the draft and capitalism, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, another Unitarian in our history, approved. But after two years and some tough cases me before the Court, Holmes was converted to a free speech advocate and contributed to significant advances in the right to expression.

A more recent example of the exercise of the right of free speech is the publishing of the Pentagon Papers, basically the US military’s secret history of the Vietnam War. I’m proud to say that it was our denominational publishing house, Beacon Press that published that volume that told Americans so much about the way their government was operating. At a recent Unitarian Universalist Association General Assembly, one of the people involved with that publication described a threatening phone call. Though the caller tried to disguise his speech, the well-known voice of President Richard M. Nixon was unmistakable.

Where does Jefferson claim these rights originate? Returning to the words of the Declaration, we read, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” According to Jefferson, the rights the colonists wanted respected were endowed to each of us by our Creator. Earlier in the document, we read that sublime phrase, “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” that guarantee the human right of self rule. Unfortunately, in practice, women, Indians, slaves, and poor people were included to a limited degree or not at all in the rights of the Constitution. Those struggles of full equality under the law, of course, continue today. But the I believe the signers of the Declaration of Independence deserve our respect for one thing they got right. That is, they beautifully expressed the nature of our rights as coming by a greater authority than the kings and presidents of the world. By so doing, these brave Americans sought to set our basic rights beyond the tampering of politicians. At the same time, they forego the idea, so common in their time as it is in ours, of curtailing the rights of those who worship the Creator differently, or do not believe in a creator at all. All were created equal, not just some. Or, as our first Unitarian Universalist Principle puts it, we must respect “the inherent worth and dignity of every person.”

I don’t pretend to know what the years ahead may bring in regard to the protection of our civil rights and liberties. On the one hand, there are shocking incidents like the police militarization at the Miami protests where similar heavy handed tactics as those used by the occupation forces in Baghdad are beginning to be used at home. I take seriously the claims by some historians that the military adventures of ancient Rome lead to the ossification of its citizen’s rights.

On the other hand, I see Americans from all over beginning to question authority, learn their rights, and fight for them. Some of those Americans are in this congregation. Our Civil Liberties Task Force, under the leadership of new member Rolf Maurer, is participating in a denomination-wide Study/Action issue this year.

The time has come once again to don our liberty caps and raise our liberty poles. In the words of the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, “Despair is not an option.” We have faced difficult and dangerous times before and retained and expanded the recognition of our liberties.

Perhaps when you were in high school, you, too, were required to write an essay on subject, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” I didn’t know it then, but those words, often attributed to Jefferson, were, as far as documentary evidence can attest, those of yet another Unitarian, Wendell Philips, who fought in the nineteenth century for the rights of women, blacks, and workers.

Though not a Unitarian, the rock musician Sting has been a champion for human rights around the world. I think he encapsulates the spirit of Jefferson and Philips, and friends of liberty everywhere when he sings, “Know your human rights, be what you come here for.” That is my hope and prayer for all of us. So may it be!

Notes:

[1]	www.fija.org
[2]	22:4 Litigation 6-60 (1996) (www.caught.net/juror.htm)