Today, we celebrate our Independence Day. Today, we celebrate our freedom, our greatness, our moral superiority. Today is the day where Americans unite and celebrate the fact that we are the freest, and therefore the best country in the entire world.
227 years ago our Founding Fathers proudly declared that every human being has the right to exist for their own sake, has the right to their own life. 227 years ago they declared that the purpose of a government is not to rule men but to protect them, to protect their fundamental right to their own life. They explicitly rejected the form of government which had ruled mankind for the centuries before them, statism. They rejected the notion that a human being exists for the sake of others and it is the purpose of the state to force them to sacrifice themself for others. However, even then, they did not get it exactly right. They allowed the government to force its citizens to sacrifice themselves in certain areas, such as slavery, states’ rights, and other statist elements of government. Despite this error however, the principle still remained as widely accepted: a human being has the right to their own life.
As we celebrate our Independence Day we must ask ourselves, have we stayed in line with these principles of our Founding Fathers? Does every human being in America have the unbreached right to their own life?
Absolutely not. The individual rights of American citizens, while the freest in the world, are being attacked on all sides. Either one has the right to their own life, to be free of physical compulsion, and free to use their own mind; or they do not. In America today, this fact is blatantly ignored. At the founding of our country, our Founding Fathers overwhelmingly declared that a human being exists for his own sake and that the purpose of a government is to protect that right to exist. But now, the idea that it is right for the government to use physical compusion against its citizens in order to serve others is widely accepted by virtually every politician and citizen of this country. The debate now is not whether or not American citizens should be made to be slaves, but rather, to what extent they should be forced to serve others.
America is an amazing country, but it will not be for long if this premise is not attacked and destroyed. On this Independence Day we must rise up and remember the fundamental principles of this country. The fundamental principle of this country is not the freedom to vote, or the freedom to speech. They are very important freedoms, but they are not the fundamental ones. No, our fundamental principle has been vastly forgotten and rejected…that every human being, by his nature as a human being, is an end in himself, has the right to life for his own sake, has the right to their own life, has the right to be free from physical compulsion, has the right to the use of their own mind.
