Democratic lawmakers might be the last group of people you’d expect to denounce the Declaration of Independence for asserting each single human being’s equal claim to the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Yet, such is the story coming out of Louisiana this week. Democratic Party legislators in the state House there have forced HB 1035 to be tabled, because its core proposal to have fourth- through sixth-graders recite the two most famous sentences in American history would require them to pronounce the falsehood that “all men are created equal.”

Democratic state representatives Barbara Norton and Pat Smith argued that it would be unfair for school children to recite the Declaration because “all men are not created equal,” and because the principles of American government that the equality principle gives life to “were used against races of people.” Both legislators seem to invoke the existence of slavery in 1776, as well as the fact that Dr. Martin Luther King had not been born yet, as proof positive of the offensiveness of the Declaration’s sentiments.