I’m one of those folks who passionately believes that racism and discrimination in all their forms is wrong—whether it’s based on race, ethnicity, religious preference, gender, sexual orientation, political preference, physical disability, marital status, socio-economic position, or a plethora of other reasons. I can’t stand it. It stinks. It is offensive and repugnant. It’s destructive and divisive. It’s ugly and evil. And yet, I see these things happening more and more everyday by people who should know better.
In our country we have a basic set of common cultural standards and values by which to live. Those common cultural standards and values are the fabric that binds us together as a nation and society and helps us identify deviant behavior that should be addressed (things like murder, theft, abuse, assault, etc.). Government did not “give” us our Constitution and Constitutional rights, but rather We The People came together in a time of significant oppression and identified those rights that we naturally possess and then we clearly identified those rights in the form of a written Constitution which also outlined the form of a new “limited“ government that was created by the People and for the People, in order to protect those very rights we hold so dear—life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, the right to speak freely, the right to own and bare arms in defense against those who would harm us as well as against a government that may become tyrannical, the right to be free from unjust searches and seizures by a government run amuck, the right to freely and without coercion vote for those we want to represent us in our chosen form of government, the right to a fair trial before a jury of our peers, and many other natural rights that had been denied us by a government that had (at that time) run amuck and become tyrannical. Some might call what we did treasonous, but it was a fight worth fighting and dying for.
Feel free to discuss, debate and even try to persuade others about the value of your beliefs, but when you step over the line and try to force your beliefs on others or deny others their rights to live according to their beliefs, that’s when you will have gone too far. As one despotic Democrat Senator so famously said, “You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price.”
by Rebecca Witherspoon
