By Joseph Farah
THE WASHINGTON TIMES / Monday, January 25, 2010
Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream. He told about his dream shortly before an assassin cut his life short:
… I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.
This is our hope. This is the faith with which I return to the South. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.
This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with a new meaning: My country, ‘tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.
And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true. And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania. Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado. Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California. But not only that, let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia. Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee. Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.
And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, Black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty, we are free at last.
Freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom. That was the King message. Martin Luther King
Jr. talked a lot more about freedom than he did rights. He was clear on where true freedom and rights came from. That distinction has been obliterated in today’s teaching about him.
Why? Because freedom cannot be doled out by government. Government would prefer to define the limits of your freedom by arbitrarily creating new “rights” and disabusing us of the notion that rights are God’s unalienable gifts to all humanity.
I, too, have a dream. I have a dream that America will return to its heritage of freedom. I have a dream that America will rise to greatness, again.
But before that dream is realized, we’ve got to recall what freedom means. We’ve got to understand that “rights” are not goodies to be appropriated by government. We’ve got to remember that with freedom comes responsibility. And we’ve got to learn that government’s power in a free society is limited to safeguarding liberty and the ability of citizens to govern themselves.
The rights we experience in America, our founders taught us, are God-given, unalienable rights. They don’t descend from government. They are not given out through acts of Congress. They cannot be invented by man. They are inherent, universal, permanent.
This is such a foundational point of understanding American civic life, history and government. We would do well to reflect on this today and throughout this critical year in American history.
Rights are inherent. Privileges are something that can be bestowed by government and taken away by government. Today, government and many of our cultural institutions are trying to blur the lines of distinction between rights and privileges. For instance, they want to persuade you that health care insurance is a right.
It’s not. It’s not even a concept the founders would have understood. Like food, health care is something an individual works hard to provide for himself and his family. If individuals are dependent upon government for necessities of life like food and health care, there’s going to be a lot of starvation and needless death and suffering.
It’s just that simple. I have a dream today that America will awaken once again to these foundational principles.
Joseph Farah is a nationally syndicated columnist.