If Barack Obama had delivered the Gettysburg Address:
Four score and seven years ago, a group of exclusively white, privileged, Native-American-killing and often slave-owning land-owners brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in antiquated notions of liberty but what we now know ought to have been the Common Good, and dedicated to the proposition that all men, women, transgendered and hermaphroditic persons are entitled to equal things.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, actually deserves to endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. I have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation, fatally flawed though it may be, might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that I should do this.
But, in a larger sense, I can not dedicate -- I can not consecrate -- I can not hallow -- this ground. The brave persons, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above my current power to add or detract. For that reason, I have issued Executive Order 1863-005, providing for an additional and long-needed Presidential consecration authority.
The world will little note, nor long remember what I say here, but that’s only because video has not yet been invented, and I can see that the press corps is already getting bored. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which I have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for me, to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored corpse-men, I take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that I here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – so that this nation, under me shall have a new birth of transformative social justice -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. At least not on my watch.
