Topeka — Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness should not include making children recite the Declaration of Independence every day, the House decided.
On a vote of 68-50, the chamber Thursday rejected a bill that would have required pupils of public and accredited private schools to recite a section of the Declaration each day, following the Pledge of Allegiance.
Some members said mandatory recitation was itself unpatriotic. Rep. Bob Tomlinson, who teaches at an alternative school, said he would not make his students do it.
"They'd tell me what I can do with the few lines of the Declaration of Independence," said Tomlinson, R-Roeland Park. "You cannot make them believe in it by making them recite it over and over and over again."
Rep. Mary Pilcher Cook, the bill's sponsor, argued that the more children recited the words, the more they would think about the meaning.
"The Declaration of Independence is our foundation," said Cook, R-Shawnee. "That is the document that got rid of slavery in our country. It gave women the right to vote."
The bill would have students recite daily the second paragraph of the Declaration, a section that many deem the essence of the historic document:
"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. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
Rep. Nancy Kirk noted that the document does not mention the equal creation of women or of blacks or any other minority and that, she said, is what its authors intended.
"This is not about civil rights," said Kirk, D-Topeka. "This is about the right of revolution."
Rep. Frank Miller, R-Independence, said many of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence died, lost their farms or became destitute during the Revolutionary War.
"I don't see what would be wrong with a few words of the Declaration of Independence," Miller said.
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