The Ming Report

We Hold These Truths…

January 26, 2006 - 230 years ago come next summer Thomas Jefferson sat down to write and from his quill came the concepts and philosophy that were the foundation upon which eleven years later James Madison’s pen would build a nation. Yet the structure was imperfect and the people in whose name the nation was created were impelled to refine and strengthen it with Amendments, ten in number, created by their Congress and ratified by their State governments designed to protect the people in their self-evident rights from abuses by their own government.

Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are not the less self-evident rights today than were they 230 years ago. Freedom of Speech; Freedom of Conscience; Freedom of Assembly; and the Freedom to Petition for the redress of grievances are not the less vital to liberty at the beginning of the Twenty-First Century than were they as the end of the Eighteenth approached. The Right to Counsel; to a Speedy and Public trial in the place where the crime was alleged to have been committed is not now less essential to the protection of individual liberty than when George III’s officers arrested and detained citizens and shipped them across the Atlantic to be tried in secret courts. The right to be free of warrantless searches and seizures unsupported by probable cause shown by the evidence is not now less essential to a free people than it was when the People of the United States demanded that their liberty be protected from their own government and the Bill of Rights was adopted.

America is under attack. It is a time of crisis and the events that enfold our time will determine nothing less than the survival of the principles of human freedom to which this nation has given reverence for more than two centuries. To those of us who love America any outcome other than the maintenance of our system of ordered liberty is unthinkable. Will we be forced to abandon our cherished freedoms; to watch them submerged in a swamp of intolerant theocracy? In the continuing fight for freedom one is either with us or he is with the avowed enemies of liberty.

But the pivotal battle for freedom is not being fought in the streets and alleys of Baghdad. The battleground on which it is being contested does not lie in the Plain of Afghanistan or the mountain defiles of the Khyber Pass. The battle for America is being fought the legislative halls; the court chambers; and the executive offices of our own government. It is being fought between those who treasure our heritage of protecting our citizens against the excesses of arbitrary government and those to whom our Constitution is an outmoded scrap of paper and an inconvenient impediment to their arrogation of unrestrained power in the name of security.

Which side are you on?