OPINION

America at a Precipice, Freedom at Risk

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America stands at a precipice. Never before have so many of our fundamental, God-given freedoms hung by so thin a thread here at home as they do now.

This generation—you and I, our neighbors and co-workers, our families and friends—will soon decide on many fronts whether or not this great experiment in freedom continues or crumbles. We will decide if we keep our Republic.

We’ve all witnessed the dramatic events that began last week on the anniversary of Sept. 11th, when terrorists invaded our sovereign territory, burned it, and killed the US diplomatic team.

And we’ve also seen how certain members of our government responded to this atrocity: namely, by putting our First Amendment on trial.

This is not out of character for the Left – this is how they operate.

For years, American citizens and American traditions have come out on the short end of the stick when the Left steps in to be sure no crisis goes to waste. All it takes is for a “victim” from a favored group to complain about an offense real or imagined, and the anti-freedom Left jumps into action. And when they do, the first thing on the chopping block is always free speech and the free exercise of religious faith and conscience.

And while the events surrounding the September 11th anniversary were glaring examples of this, we cannot overlook that fact that there are smaller, daily erosions of our liberty that are happening all the time but going unreported.

For example, the same Left that is limiting free speech to protect the public’s “religious feelings” is also infiltrating professional organizations and the education systems that control the destinies of so many Americans. From those lofty perches they will enforce their ideology with such aggression that mere disagreement leads to banishment from the profession or expulsion from the schools.

They create quasi-government courts with noble sounding names like the “Human Rights Commission,” then use these bodies to drive people of faith from the marketplace or impose heavy penalties on those who choose to stay and fight. They come down especially hard on those who dare remain convinced of the Constitutionally-protected freedoms of religion and of speech.

Both the glaring attacks and the more subtle ones have one thing in common—they are all alike used to chip away at our freedoms and bring us into compliance with the ideology of a Left that has staked its claim on America’s failure.

We stand at a precipice. And this great country, through which God has given us so much, now teeters on the edge of a dark future in which freedom is a distant memory.

We cannot allow this to happen. For if we lose the God-given freedoms our Founders passed on to us, we lose America.

It is imperative that we fulfill our civic responsibility and vote this November.