It's haunting that at the same moment Americans celebrated the 234th birthday of those immortal words that all men are endowed with unalienable, natural, God-given rights, President Barack Obama's nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court was rejecting any notion of their existence.

In what has to be one of the most frightening examples of the intellectually bankrupt and morally debilitating effects that modern leftism has on the human mind, Solicitor General Elena Kagan pretended that the principles set forth in America's founding document - the Declaration of Independence - have no impact on the decisions, opinions and philosophies of a good justice.  Her exchange with Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn should, if we have any common sense left as a people, utterly disqualify her from service and call into serious question the judgment of a president who would appoint someone so backwards to the Court.

What made the Declaration of Independence so remarkable, and subsequently made the U.S. so exceptional, was its awareness and articulation of the fact that there exists beyond the laws of man a natural law.  Call it a moral law, absolute truth, or the law of God.it all means the same thing: that there are certain rights and privileges afforded to humanity not by any government.  But rather, man (even the lowliest among us) is endowed with those rights by a transcendent authority that exists above and beyond all earthly power.