Rick Santorum would deny gay and lesbian Americans the right to marry, even though the Declaration of Independence promises their right to the pursuit of happiness.
Todd Pettigrew, Associate Professor of English at Cape Breton University, deconstructs Rick Santorum's argument as follows:
Santorum begins by saying that in the USA, rights come from God and that the pursuit of happiness has been misunderstood. It doesn't mean the pursuit of what makes one pleased or content, but rather the ability to do good according to God's laws. Santorum says:
"God gives you the rights. He doesn't give them to you and says, 'Do whatever you want.' He gave them to you and said -- well, look at later on in the Declaration they refer to nature and nature's God. That we are to live by the natural law and God's laws.
"That is what when they talked about the 'pursuit of happiness.' If you go back and read the definition in Webster at the time of the Declaration, or certainly thereafter, what 'happiness' was defined as was doing good. Doing good, doing what is moral. So the pursuit of something ordered and morally good is what our founders were saying. ... "
At first it sounds like a profound insight. Words, after all, can and do change meaning ... So it's possible that happiness didn't mean then what it means now, we may all be fundamentally misreading a crucial document of American history, and Santorum has set us straight.
The problem is that even a little research shows that Santorum is simply wrong about the meaning of the word in the period. For one thing, Webster didn't publish his definitive comprehensive dictionary until 1828, more than fifty years after the Declaration was made (he did publish a smaller dictionary in 1806 but the point remains the same). So to cite Webster in this context is a historical blunder, even with Santorum's odd interjection "or certainly thereafter." Still, couldn't the larger point be valid, that the "happiness" in the pursuit of happiness did not have its modern meaning in 1776? It could be, but it's not. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, which (as humanities students know) traces the meanings of known English words over time, happiness takes on its most current meaning "the state of pleasurable content of mind" as early as 1591. So the meaning of "happiness" as we normally understand it, and as it is clearly intended in the Declaration of Independence, was already almost 200 years old by the time Jefferson and company wrote the fabled line.
Read more:
http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-10-08-11.htm
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