The real price of freedom is that you give it to others, even those who disagree with you.
Most people aren't willing to grant that. Even in America, this has always been controversial.
John Adams signed a Sedition Act, criminalizing political criticism. Abraham Lincoln arrested a Democratic Congressman, Clement Vanlandingham, who called for peace with the South. Germans were harassed in World War I, Japanese in World War II. There were Red Scares in the 1920s, the McCarthyism in the early years of the Cold War.
And so it is today. Once again we are faced with this key question. Will we pay the price of freedom?
Newt Gingrich, who seeks to become President of the United States, says no.
Newt Gingrich will not pay the price of his own liberty. Freedom for me but not for thee. He does not deserve his freedom. Neither does anyone who follows him.
To my eye, they are not Americans. They are just people who live in America.
This is a basic question, one which defines who we are, one I hope we all give the serious consideration
it deserves.
The real question is whether freedom really works, or whether it should just be a flag we use to mask our national self-interest.
Mr. Gingrich is going with the flag theory. Many conservatives believe strongly that we won our great conflicts of the 20th century despite our freedom, that we won them through military force.
I think they're wrong. I think we won because of freedom, because freedom enabled the creativity that built our economy, our technology, and our culture.
Ronald Reagan didn't destroy the Soviet Union with Star Wars. He tapped it with military spending, and it promptly collapsed out of its own internal contradictions with human nature.
Now there are evil people out there. There are technologies available now that can do severe harm to all life on this planet, if unleashed by people with bad intent. (Or merely a profit motive. Or fear of The Other.)
But the answer is not to restrict freedom. It is to embrace freedom. Those "evil people" are people. They have children. They want to live, and want those children to live.
The idea of a non-human, sub-human "other" who will "stop at nothing" and whom we must protect ourselves from at all costs is a strawman, designed to send us scurrying from freedom the way cockroaches scurry from the light.
The strawman has always been invoked, throughout our history, by those who wish to turn freedom into its opposite, and transform America into a dictatorship of their own making. These were, and are, small-minded men, and profoundly un-American in their outlook. If you have principles you live by them.
Ultimately this is a question of how you view human nature. Gingrich and his ilk are like preachers who expect others to obey God while they go out and have a good time. The comparison is apt, because most of these preachers, like Ted Haggard, find their own souls to be evil. There was no contradiction in Haggard preaching against homosexuality on the one hand and committing homosexual acts on the other. He was always preaching against himself, seeing his own innermost self as evil, and thus quite willing to see evil in everyone else.
Freedom at its heart is the assumption that given freedom men and women will use it wisely.
So I say, go toward the light. Trust freedom. Don't be afraid. Believe in your own humanity, and the humanity of all people. Have faith. Without faith in ourselves and our values, we have nothing.
Let Newt Gingrich and his ilk have absolute freedom of speech. But leave the rest of us free to ignore them. To be ignored, forgotten, unheard, unbidden -- that is the fate men like Gingrich deserve.
These colors don't run from freedom.
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