March 2nd is Independence Day in Texas. So, Happy Independence Day to all my Texas native and non native friends.

Texas was then as it is now an independently minded citizenry. Those from Mexican descent and those that immigrated here, both enjoyed liberty under the Constitution of Mexico.  It was not until the military dictator, Santa Anna, abolished the Mexican Constitution did Texans wish to flex that independence that they had come to love about their home.

The Declaration begins:

When a government has ceased to protect the lives, liberty and property of the people, from whom its legitimate powers are derived, and for the advancement of whose happiness it was instituted, and so far from being a guarantee for the enjoyment of those inestimable and inalienable rights, becomes an instrument in the hands of evil rulers for their oppression.

The General Convention laid out all of the grievances perpetrated on the peoples of Texas and their rights trampled on by an oppressive dictator.  Texans, like the Founder’s of the United States had an excellent grasp of Natural Law, as they describe the case for the first law of nature.

When, in consequence of such acts of malfeasance and abdication on the part of the government, anarchy prevails, and civil society is dissolved into its original elements. In such a crisis, the first law of nature, the right of self-preservation, the inherent and inalienable rights of the people to appeal to first principles, and take their political affairs into their own hands in extreme cases, enjoins it as a right towards themselves, and a sacred obligation to their posterity, to abolish such government, and create another in its stead, calculated to rescue them from impending dangers, and to secure their future welfare and happiness.

Self-preservation as the first law of nature must exist and should be used to protect the second – Liberty. Most of the declaration discusses the Liberties that were in jeopardy. Religious Liberty was one of such rights worth fighting.

It denies us the right of worshipping the Almighty according to the dictates of our own conscience, by the support of a national religion, calculated to promote the temporal interest of its human functionaries, rather than the glory of the true and living God.

God Bless Texas! Let us never lose the Independent spirit. Keep up the fight Patriots. As goes Texas, so goes the United States.

Texas has yet to learn submission to any oppression, come from what source it may. – Sam Houston