On this day in 1791, Virginia's ratification of the first ten Amendments to the U.S. Constitution effected the ratification of the Bill of Rights. Happy Bill of Rights Day.
Of course, as Thomas Jefferson noted, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, and it seems the radical Left is waging a full-throated war on our constitutional liberties. Witness the war on free speech at college campuses, the war on religious liberty by the Obama administration, and the Left's war on due process and gun rights by insisting that merely being on the no-fly list should deprive you of your right to purchase firearms.
In an excellent piece at National Review Online challenging us all to "Stand Up for Free Speech on Bill of Rights Day," David Tucker makes some interesting observations which should be helpful in pushing back against radical identity-politics leftism on the college campus and in our broader popular culture and politically-correct news media:
Those who drafted the Bill of Rights understood that all mankind shares a common humanity more fundamental than gender, race, or class. What principally constitutes our common humanity is, as Jefferson put it, “that almighty God hath created the mind free.” And because our minds are free, our speech must be free.
Citizens can reason together and share in common self-government. When speech is free, we can know the truth and the difference between justice and injustice.
This understanding was the basis for Martin Luther King Jr.’s work in the Civil Rights movement, a movement contemporary with the Free Speech movement at Berkeley. In his last speech, King reminded his audience that full enjoyment of civil rights requires unwavering devotion to the fundamental rights of the First Amendment, the rights to speak, assemble, and petition.
On this anniversary of the Bill of Rights, we should recall the truths known to those who drafted it: These truths are supremely powerful because they are irrefutably true.
The whole thing is worth a read.
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