The Southwest Voice

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Leisure reading for me a while back consisted of “The Federalist Papers,” and I’m grateful it was so. It is amazing how much truth can be gleaned when one goes to the source, rather than relying on a mouthpiece that purports to educate you on its version of what the source says. Case in point: a U.S. Government class in high school told me that our Founding Fathers had distaste for all religion, thus, the addition of the First Amendment. However, writings from the Founding Fathers themselves indicate that they were men of faith and only wanted church and state separated because they did not want any one religion seizing the state to make all citizens involuntary converts. They never indicated that religion, and the very mention of God, be left out of the state all together.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” — from the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776. You might be more familiar with this quote in the form it is usually transcribed, with ellipses conveniently placed between the words “equal” and “with certain unalienable rights.” They made mention of God in our country’s most sacred documents, but children are no longer allowed to make mention of Him even in an essay without fear of repercussion.

Religion is a topic which we have dissected so thoroughly and prided ourselves with such a philosophical understanding of how we can implement it into our freedom, that to even speak of such can be politically incorrect. A beautiful disaster to be sure, and a paradox at heart. But, as with all paradoxes, one attribute will inevitably fail. Which will win then in our American freedom? The beauty or the disaster?

If we keep the courage our forefathers had, I hope beauty will prevail because the declaration also states, in talking about “light and transient causes,” that “mankind [is] more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

In other words, sometimes it’s better to let America be America, and our freedom be the freedom it has been for all these years, than to change the way this country operates to fit a smaller, but louder, agenda.