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TheOtherDave comments on A sense of logic - Less Wrong
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Well, yes, if you boil the original quote down to "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are [irrelevant stuff] endowed [somehow or other] with certain unalienable Rights, and [details about rights]" then whatever problems there are with the pieces you cut out (including "all men are created equal") will be difficult to see.
As a general rule, if you want to explore the implications of a particular phrase, it really helps to attend to that phrase, not elide over it.
Anyway, for my own part, if your understanding of "created equal" here is compatible with some people being born smart, some dumb, some sociopathic, some epileptic, some congenitally ill, and so on and so forth, then there's no problem. But I have a problem with folks, and there are many, who quote that line when their understanding of equality is incompatible with readily observed discrepancies in initial conditions and capabilities among people.
Given a quote like this, I think the best/most obvious interpretation is to read the quote in its famous historical and political context. Divorced from that context and read literally, it is obviously false. To the extent people are parroting those words to invoke a literal interpretation, that is obviously wrong. That being said, I think that in most cases where the term is used with even the slightest thought and consideration, it is steeped in at least a bit of the political flavor of the original and is used as a statement about how people interact with each other, government, and/or society.
Fair enough.
My answer to your original question ("I don’t understand the problem with “all men are created equal.”) boils down to the fact that it is often quoted outside of its original context, causing it to be (as you say) obviously wrong.
When it is instead quoted with due consideration for its original context, properly steeped in the proper political flavor, and as a statement about how people interact, I agree with you that it stops being obviously wrong, and becomes much less problematic.
I think the majority of real-world uses are in the former category. I could be wrong.
I don't think I've ever heard it used the former way, though perhaps we run in different circles.
Huh. It seems unlikely that different circles accounts for all of the difference; more likely one or both of us is suffering from selective data neglect. I'll have to pay more attention to this as it comes up in the future.
Blank slateists?
Well, I was thinking more of the folks who just quote it without thinking about what they're actually saying at all, but sure, insofar as there exist universal blank-slatists, them too. (I mean, I think there's room for legitimate uncertainty about what differences are determined at "creation" and what differences are imposed later, but it seems clear that some very important things really are different at "creation.")