WALKING TODAY BACK TO MY FAVORITE, or more accurately, one of my two favorite monuments in Washington: Jefferson Memorial... Lincoln Memorial is the other... I had plenty to think about.   Then I went for a walk in the green Virginia woods.

Jefferson and Lincoln were in their times prisoners of their age, as we all are. I’d like to think when they used “man” in their writing and speaking, they were using the word in its generic sense. I’m convinced both of them would like Barack Obama and would celebrate his election to the high office they once held. I’m also convinced they would like the idea of Hillary Clinton in the office and would find laughable the idea of Sarah Palin in the White House. 

Jefferson:  “No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship or  ministry or shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or beliefs, but all men shall be free to profess and by argument to maintain their opinions in matters of religion.  I know but one code of morality for men whether acting singly or collectively.”

Lincoln:  [in a speech at Lewiston, Illinois, in 1858 before he elected president...regarding the framers of the Declaration of Independence] These communities, by their representatives in old Independence Hall, said to the whole world of men: "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." This was their majestic interpretation of the economy of the Universe. This was their lofty, and wise, and noble understanding of the justice of the Creator to His creatures. [Applause.] Yes, gentlemen, to all His creatures, to the whole great family of man. In their enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows. They grasped not only the whole race of man then living, but they reached forward and seized upon the farthest posterity. They erected a beacon to guide their children and their children's children, and the countless myriads who should inhabit the earth in other ages. Wise statesmen as they were, they knew the tendency of prosperity to breed tyrants, and so they established these great self-evident truths, that when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, were entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, their posterity might look up again to the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began -- so that truth, and justice, and mercy, and all the humane and Christian virtues might not be extinguished from the land; so that no man would hereafter dare to limit and circumscribe the great principles on which the temple of liberty was being built.