The three articles I posted this week appear on the same page-and-a-half in the latest Economist magazine. I think they are each worth some consideration for Christians who want to wrestle with what the proper place of government is in society (local, state, and federal). I hope we might discuss how our Christian identity informs our political views on these issues, as well as, how our particular Christian communions are engaging these issues directly.
-NB
The Economist “Getting Strategic” (June 26-July 2, 2010)
IT USED to be the case that the homeless were, almost exclusively, single adults. Today homelessness is affecting a growing share of families with children too. The number of homeless families has increased by 30% during the past two years. During the 2008-09 school year, America’s public schools reported more than 956,000 homeless pupils, a 20% increase over the previous school year. In New York City alone, some 8,200 families with children are homeless.
Overall, the number without homes is staggering. The number of homeless veterans of the Vietnam war is greater than the number who died in it. On any given night in America more than 640,000 men, women and children are forced to seek shelter, live in their cars, or sleep on the streets. Last year nearly 1.6m people used an emergency shelter.
The Obama administration unveiled a multi-agency national strategy to combat this national disgrace on June 22nd. The plan has four goals. It aims to end chronic homelessness (defined as being continuously homeless for more than a year) in five years, and homelessness among veterans in five years, too. It also seeks to end homelessness for families and children within a decade. And it will lay down a strategy for tackling all other types of homelessness as well. The 67-page plan, called “Opening Doors”, is the first comprehensive federal effort to end the evil, which is normally a matter for the states. This is “a tragedy we can solve” says Shaun Donovan, secretary of housing and urban development and chair of the Inter-agency Council on Homelessness, which drew up the plan.
Much of the progress made in battling homelessness—chronic homelessness has fallen by a third in the past five years—has been at local level. The new plan hopes to take what is working best in cities and counties and apply it nationwide.
Expanding the supply of affordable housing would be a good first step. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, there is a shortage of 3.1m low-cost rental units. Collaborative efforts at the state and local level, along with partnerships with private and non-profit groups, have reduced homelessness in places like Chicago by as much as 12%. Getting federal agencies to work together has helped to take veterans off the streets and obtain health benefits for them. A multi-agency effort that combines housing with social-services support is essential, according to Mr Donovan, and results in fewer hospitalisations, fewer costly ambulance and police call-outs and fewer days behind bars. It will save money for taxpayers, too.
Barack Obama seems determined to do something about homelessness. Last year’s stimulus package included $1.5 billion to prevent it. He also signed the HEARTH Act, which strives to rehouse rapidly those who lost their homes. The Reverend Glenn Chalmers, of the Holy Apostles soup kitchen in New York, is glad that the federal government has finally taken the lead on this issue. Perhaps because the queues for food begin early every morning outside his church and are as much part of the urban landscape as the skyscrapers, he remains a little sceptical.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Article 16 (Immigration)
The Economist “Our Town” (June 26-July 2, 2010)
A small city passes a controversial immigration ordinance
SOME of the earliest settlers of Nebraska were Germans. During the first world war the state forbade any teaching in their native language. But that was long ago. These days, just outside the tidy little city of Fremont, a new batch of residents is trying to settle in. The Regency II trailer park houses immigrants, mostly from Mexico. Many of the trailers are just flimsy boxes. Others are painted brightly, or sport day lilies on a small lawn. One house has an American flag beside it. And on June 21st the Regency displayed a white sign at its entrance with the message: “Vote No”.
That day Fremont voted “yes” to a new ordinance that aims to rid the town of illegal immigrants. It is the latest place to try to solve immigration problems on its own. “This is our town,” declares Jerry Hart, a retired worker for the Internal Revenue Service and one of the ordinance’s main advocates. “Nobody is going to take care of us but us.”
Fremont is far from the heat of the border. But in recent decades farm states like Nebraska have seen a slow ebbing of their population and the influx of two new sorts of people. Slaughterhouses have moved from the cities to places where land is cheap and unions less pesky. Immigrants, seeking jobs, have followed. In 2007 foreign-born residents made up 5.6% of Nebraska’s population, triple the share of 1990. This has led to small flare-ups—a school overwhelmed by Spanish-speaking pupils, for example—and big ones, such as clashes in 2008 between Hispanic and Somali meatpackers.
In Fremont, as in many other such towns, the Hispanic population has surged. Between 2000 and 2008 the Hispanic share of Fremont’s population grew from 4.3% to 7.8%. Meanwhile Fremont’s white population dipped. Les Leech, Fremont Beef’s president, says that his company would have struggled without immigrants. “I didn’t need cheap labour. I needed labour,” he explains.
Not everyone has been encouraged by the change. The vote on June 21st followed more than two years of rancour. A city councilman proposed the ordinance in 2008, demanding that the city should evaluate the legal status of all renters and force businesses to check workers’ documents with a federal database, E-Verify. (The language was drafted by the same lawyer who helped craft Arizona’s recent anti-immigrant law.) After a failed council vote, a petition drive and a legal brawl to stop the referendum, in April Nebraska’s Supreme Court ruled that a vote should proceed. It was approved by 57% to 43%.
It is unclear how the new law will curb illegal immigration. Hormel and Fremont Beef, the big local meatpackers, already use E-Verify. The plants themselves are outside city limits, as are trailer parks such as the Regency. “You’ve got to start somewhere,” insists Mr Hart.
The most likely result, however, is further strife. Susana Patino, a Hispanic-American born in Texas, works at a local tool-and-dye business. Her husband, born in Mexico, has been promoted at Hormel. But she worries about her family and friends. “It’s stupid, crazy,” she says, bewildered. “We helped Fremont to grow.”
A small city passes a controversial immigration ordinance
SOME of the earliest settlers of Nebraska were Germans. During the first world war the state forbade any teaching in their native language. But that was long ago. These days, just outside the tidy little city of Fremont, a new batch of residents is trying to settle in. The Regency II trailer park houses immigrants, mostly from Mexico. Many of the trailers are just flimsy boxes. Others are painted brightly, or sport day lilies on a small lawn. One house has an American flag beside it. And on June 21st the Regency displayed a white sign at its entrance with the message: “Vote No”.
That day Fremont voted “yes” to a new ordinance that aims to rid the town of illegal immigrants. It is the latest place to try to solve immigration problems on its own. “This is our town,” declares Jerry Hart, a retired worker for the Internal Revenue Service and one of the ordinance’s main advocates. “Nobody is going to take care of us but us.”
Fremont is far from the heat of the border. But in recent decades farm states like Nebraska have seen a slow ebbing of their population and the influx of two new sorts of people. Slaughterhouses have moved from the cities to places where land is cheap and unions less pesky. Immigrants, seeking jobs, have followed. In 2007 foreign-born residents made up 5.6% of Nebraska’s population, triple the share of 1990. This has led to small flare-ups—a school overwhelmed by Spanish-speaking pupils, for example—and big ones, such as clashes in 2008 between Hispanic and Somali meatpackers.
In Fremont, as in many other such towns, the Hispanic population has surged. Between 2000 and 2008 the Hispanic share of Fremont’s population grew from 4.3% to 7.8%. Meanwhile Fremont’s white population dipped. Les Leech, Fremont Beef’s president, says that his company would have struggled without immigrants. “I didn’t need cheap labour. I needed labour,” he explains.
Not everyone has been encouraged by the change. The vote on June 21st followed more than two years of rancour. A city councilman proposed the ordinance in 2008, demanding that the city should evaluate the legal status of all renters and force businesses to check workers’ documents with a federal database, E-Verify. (The language was drafted by the same lawyer who helped craft Arizona’s recent anti-immigrant law.) After a failed council vote, a petition drive and a legal brawl to stop the referendum, in April Nebraska’s Supreme Court ruled that a vote should proceed. It was approved by 57% to 43%.
It is unclear how the new law will curb illegal immigration. Hormel and Fremont Beef, the big local meatpackers, already use E-Verify. The plants themselves are outside city limits, as are trailer parks such as the Regency. “You’ve got to start somewhere,” insists Mr Hart.
The most likely result, however, is further strife. Susana Patino, a Hispanic-American born in Texas, works at a local tool-and-dye business. Her husband, born in Mexico, has been promoted at Hormel. But she worries about her family and friends. “It’s stupid, crazy,” she says, bewildered. “We helped Fremont to grow.”
Article 15 (Law/Divorce)
The Economist “Divorce in New York: Let Them Unwed” (June 26-July 2, 2010)
CHANA and Simon Taub battled in the courts for years. Unlike every other state in the union, New York does not allow a fast, blameless divorce. Irreconcilable differences or “we grew apart” won’t fly; adultery, abandonment, or cruel and inhumane treatment must instead be proved. Mr Taub denied his wife’s claims of abuse. Both refused to leave their Brooklyn home; so a court-ordered dividing wall split their living quarters. And the Taubs are hardly alone. Rudy Giuliani, a former presidential candidate and former mayor of New York, famously feuded for months with his ex-wife over who was cruel and inhumane. Both couples might have benefited from a new bill that has just been passed by New York’s state Senate.
If the bill is also passed by the Assembly, New York will at last join the other 49 states in allowing people to divorce speedily without the consent of their spouse or a proof of fault. This worries Raoul Felder, a celebrity lawyer known to the gossip columns as “Dr Estranged Love” and the “Duke of Divorce”. He thinks that divorce rates will rise and that the only beneficiaries of the change will be his fellow legal eagles. He is partly right. According to a 2007 paper by Justin Wolfers at the Wharton School, divorce rates rose sharply after other states adopted no-fault divorce, but this trend reversed within a decade. Indeed, Mr Wolfers found that “15 years after the reform, the divorce rate is lower.”
The New York State chapter of the National Organisation for Women (NOW) and the Catholic church for once agree; they are both vehemently opposed to the new measure. NOW fears the change will leave women unprotected. Liz Krueger, a state senator who co-sponsored the bill, disagrees. “The research shows female suicide and domestic violence fell in states that adopted no-fault divorce laws,” she said. Ms Krueger had to move to Ohio to get her own divorce.
Even judges are fed up with the outdated process, not to mention all the judicial time it wastes. New York’s divorce law is in “the dark ages”, lamented one law-school professor, but it is not the only antiquated law on the books. Adultery, for instance, is still a class B misdemeanour.
CHANA and Simon Taub battled in the courts for years. Unlike every other state in the union, New York does not allow a fast, blameless divorce. Irreconcilable differences or “we grew apart” won’t fly; adultery, abandonment, or cruel and inhumane treatment must instead be proved. Mr Taub denied his wife’s claims of abuse. Both refused to leave their Brooklyn home; so a court-ordered dividing wall split their living quarters. And the Taubs are hardly alone. Rudy Giuliani, a former presidential candidate and former mayor of New York, famously feuded for months with his ex-wife over who was cruel and inhumane. Both couples might have benefited from a new bill that has just been passed by New York’s state Senate.
If the bill is also passed by the Assembly, New York will at last join the other 49 states in allowing people to divorce speedily without the consent of their spouse or a proof of fault. This worries Raoul Felder, a celebrity lawyer known to the gossip columns as “Dr Estranged Love” and the “Duke of Divorce”. He thinks that divorce rates will rise and that the only beneficiaries of the change will be his fellow legal eagles. He is partly right. According to a 2007 paper by Justin Wolfers at the Wharton School, divorce rates rose sharply after other states adopted no-fault divorce, but this trend reversed within a decade. Indeed, Mr Wolfers found that “15 years after the reform, the divorce rate is lower.”
The New York State chapter of the National Organisation for Women (NOW) and the Catholic church for once agree; they are both vehemently opposed to the new measure. NOW fears the change will leave women unprotected. Liz Krueger, a state senator who co-sponsored the bill, disagrees. “The research shows female suicide and domestic violence fell in states that adopted no-fault divorce laws,” she said. Ms Krueger had to move to Ohio to get her own divorce.
Even judges are fed up with the outdated process, not to mention all the judicial time it wastes. New York’s divorce law is in “the dark ages”, lamented one law-school professor, but it is not the only antiquated law on the books. Adultery, for instance, is still a class B misdemeanour.
Sunday, June 6, 2010
Article 14 (International Affairs/Israel)
The Economist "Israel's siege mentality: The government’s macho attitude is actually making Israel weaker" (June 5-11, 2010)
THE lethal mishandling of Israel’s attack on a ship carrying humanitarian supplies that was trying to break the blockade of Gaza was bound to provoke outrage—and rightly so. The circumstances of the raid are murky and may well remain that way despite an inquiry (see article). But the impression received yet again by the watching world is that Israel resorts to violence too readily. More worryingly for Israel, the episode is accelerating a slide towards its own isolation. Once admired as a plucky David facing down an array of Arab Goliaths, Israel is now seen as the clumsy bully on the block.
Israel’s desire to stop the flotilla reaching Gaza was understandable, given its determination to maintain the blockade. Yet the Israelis also had a responsibility to conduct the operation safely. The campaigners knew that either way they would win. If they had got through, it would have been a triumphant breaching of the blockade. If forcibly stopped, with their cargo of medical equipment and humanitarian aid, they would be portrayed as victims—even if some, as the Israelis contend, brought clubs, knives and poles. As it was, disastrous planning by Israel’s soldiers led to a needless loss of life.
For anyone who cares about Israel, this tragedy should be the starting point for deeper questions—about the blockade, about the Jewish state’s increasing loneliness and the route to peace. A policy of trying to imprison the Palestinians has left their jailer strangely besieged.
Losing friends, strengthening Hamas
The blockade of Gaza is cruel and has failed. The Gazans have suffered sorely but have not been starved into submission. Hamas has not been throttled and overthrown, as Israeli governments (and many others) have wished. Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier taken hostage, has not been freed. Weapons and missiles can still be smuggled in through tunnels from Egypt.
Just as bad, from Israel’s point of view, it helps feed antipathy towards Israel, not just in the Arab and Muslim worlds, but in Europe too. Israel once had warm relations with a ring of non-Arab countries in the vicinity, including Iran and Turkey. The deterioration of Israel’s relations with Turkey, whose citizens were among the nine dead, is depriving Israel of a rare Muslim ally and mediator. It is startling how, in its bungled effort to isolate Gaza, democratic Israel has come off worse than Hamas, which used to send suicide-bombers into restaurants.
Most telling of all are the stirrings of disquiet in America, Israel’s most steadfast ally. Americans are still vastly more sympathetic to the Israelis than to the Palestinians. But a growing number, especially Democrats, including many liberal Jews, are getting queasier about what they see as America’s too robotic support for Israel, especially when its government is as hawkish as Binyamin Netanyahu’s. A gap in sympathy for Israel has widened between Democrats and Republicans. Conservatives still tend to back Israel through hell and the high seas. Barack Obama is more conscious that the Palestinians’ failure to get a state is helping to spread anti-American poison across the Muslim world, making it harder for him to deal with Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan. His generals have strenuously made that point. None other than the head of Israel’s Mossad, its foreign intelligence service, declared this week that America has begun to see Israel more as a burden than an asset.
That has led to the charge by hawkish American Republicans, as well as many Israelis, that Mr Obama is bent on betraying Israel. In fact, he is motivated by a harder-nosed appreciation of the pros and cons of America’s cosiness with Israel, and is thus all the keener to prod the Jewish state towards giving the Palestinians a fair deal. He has condemned the building of Jewish settlements on Palestinian territory more bluntly than his predecessors did, because he rightly thinks they make it harder to negotiate a peace deal. Mr Obama’s greater sternness towards Israel is for the general good—including Israel’s.
Harmony is not just a dream
Israel is caught in a vicious circle. The more its hawks think the outside world will always hate it, the more it tends to shoot opponents first and ask questions later, and the more it finds that the world is indeed full of enemies. Though Mr Netanyahu has reluctantly agreed to freeze settlement-building and is negotiating indirectly with Palestinians, he does not give the impression of being willing to give ground in the interests of peace.
Yet the prospect of a deal between Palestinians and Israelis still beckons. The contours of a two-state solution remain crystal-clear: an adjusted border, with Israel keeping some of the biggest settlements while Palestine gets equal swaps of land; Jerusalem shared as a capital, with special provisions for the holy places; and an admission by Palestinians that they cannot return to their old homes in what became Israel in 1948, with some theoretical right of return acknowledged by Israel and a small number of refugees let back without threatening the demographic preponderance of Jewish Israelis.
And what about Hamas, if Israel is to lift the siege of Gaza? How should Israel handle an authoritarian movement that refuses to recognise it and has in the past readily used terror? One answer is to ask the UN to oversee the flow of goods and people going in and out of Gaza. That is hardly a cure-all, but Hamas would become the world’s problem neighbour, not just Israel’s. The Arab world must do more, pressing Hamas to disavow violence, publicly pledge not to resume the firing of rockets at Israeli civilians and revoke its anti-Semitic charter. The West, led by Mr Obama, should call for Hamas to be drawn into negotiations, both with its rival Palestinians on the West Bank as well as with Israel, even if it does not immediately recognise the Jewish state. It is still the party the Palestinians elected in 2006 to represent all of them. None of this will be easy. But the present stalemate is bloodily leading nowhere.
Israel is a regional hub of science, business and culture. Despite its harsh treatment of Palestinians in the land it occupies, it remains a vibrant democracy. But its loneliness, partly self-inflicted, is making it a worse place, not just for the Palestinians but also for its own people. If only it can replenish its stock of idealism and common sense before it is too late.
Article 13 (Political/National Identity)
As with the last two week period, I am again posting two unrelated articles for discussion. -NB
Christianity Today “Who Are Americans: What Christians Contribute to the Search for a National Identity” (June 2010)
By Chuck Colson with Catherine Larson
Nations around the world are suffering from identity crises. Perhaps it began two decades ago, when the last European holdouts were dragged in and the European Union was finally established, a move described by one journalist as “the triumph of the Eurocrats over the peoples of Europe.” More recently, The New York Times reported on France’s efforts to articulate its national identity. Soon thereafter, controversy erupted when Switzerland banned the construction of Muslim minarets. The Times and Forbes reported on identity crises facing South Korea and China, as immigration makes largely homogenous nations increasingly diverse.
All these reports raise the question, “Who are we?” --which is also the title of scholar Samuel P. Huntington’s final and most prophetic book. “The more general causes of these...questionings,” wrote Huntington, “include the emergence of a global economy, tremendous improvements in communications and transportation, rising levels of migration, [and] the global expansion of democracy...”
There’s also an identity crisis bubbling just under the surface in the United States.
Huntington documents several challenges to a cohesive sense of American identity. First, while early settlers and immigrants were never ethnically homogenous, they largely traded in the same Anglo-Protestant cultural currency. But as 21st-century demographic trends increasingly draw people from other quadrants of the world, shared cultural assumptions erode.
Exacerbating the problem is a rise in dual citizenship and more subnational identities, which have created divided loyalties. Meanwhile, in the business community, an increasingly globalized economy has caused leaders to adopt a more transnational identity, what some call “Davos man.” And aside from a temporary resurgence of patriotism after September 11, Huntington documents how academic elites have led the way in devaluing patriotism and American history.
We rightly pride ourselves on our multiethnic, multiracial society. But as our society grows ever more diverse, how will we understand our national identity?
Huntington poses four possible solutions. The first is a creedal community whose identity exists only in a social contract embodied in the Declaration of Independence and other founding documents. This has historically provided cohesion. The next option is a bifurcated America, one that is bilingual and bicultural like Canada or Belgium. The third option is an exclusivist or imperial notion of America. And the last alternative, the one Huntington clearly favored, is a reinvigorated core culture and religion coupled with the earlier solution of a reinvigorated creedal community.
Can a Christian worldview inform us as a we wrestle with out national identity? Any kind of racially or ethnically intolerant society would be incompatible with Christian principles.
Further, we know that the core values of our creeds, which in particular promote the dignity of all people, resonate with Scripture and are worth preserving. American patriotism does not rest on jingoistic nationalism but on a universal creed that says, “All men are...endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”
Liberty is one of those unalienable rights. And this core value, also emphasized in Scripture, teaches us that we cannot force beliefs on others. Our founders understood, however, that freedom of religion is not synonymous with expunging religion from public life, a problem that I and others addressed last fall in the Manhattan Declaration. So if Huntington is in fact right that the U.S. needs a reinvigorated religious commitment, it won’t come from a nation-mandated religion but rather from a reinvigorated populace.
I believe, then, that for national identity to be salient in the midst of our changing society, we need a recommitment to our creeds, a respect for American history, and a proper role of patriotism, rooted in love of neighbor. Our founders’ Judeo-Christian heritage helped produce a culture in which moral responsibility, transcendent ethical principles, and the dignity of all people could flourish--a culture in which our creedal values made sense. This is why our role as leaven within society is so important, and why we must continue to bring biblical influence to the public square, reinvigorating society.
As we do so, we must guard against the easy tendency to embrace xenophobic notions or fall into equally perilous trap of promoting subcultural identities over national identity. People will not live with, let alone die for, a nation that has abandoned its religious moorings and adopted a creed that suggests we simply live together in cosmopolitan bliss. Millions of us, however, have been willing to live and die for beliefs rooted in our deepest convictions about God and man--convictions that were expressed so well in the stirring words of our national creed, the Declaration of Independence.
Christianity Today “Who Are Americans: What Christians Contribute to the Search for a National Identity” (June 2010)
By Chuck Colson with Catherine Larson
Nations around the world are suffering from identity crises. Perhaps it began two decades ago, when the last European holdouts were dragged in and the European Union was finally established, a move described by one journalist as “the triumph of the Eurocrats over the peoples of Europe.” More recently, The New York Times reported on France’s efforts to articulate its national identity. Soon thereafter, controversy erupted when Switzerland banned the construction of Muslim minarets. The Times and Forbes reported on identity crises facing South Korea and China, as immigration makes largely homogenous nations increasingly diverse.
All these reports raise the question, “Who are we?” --which is also the title of scholar Samuel P. Huntington’s final and most prophetic book. “The more general causes of these...questionings,” wrote Huntington, “include the emergence of a global economy, tremendous improvements in communications and transportation, rising levels of migration, [and] the global expansion of democracy...”
There’s also an identity crisis bubbling just under the surface in the United States.
Huntington documents several challenges to a cohesive sense of American identity. First, while early settlers and immigrants were never ethnically homogenous, they largely traded in the same Anglo-Protestant cultural currency. But as 21st-century demographic trends increasingly draw people from other quadrants of the world, shared cultural assumptions erode.
Exacerbating the problem is a rise in dual citizenship and more subnational identities, which have created divided loyalties. Meanwhile, in the business community, an increasingly globalized economy has caused leaders to adopt a more transnational identity, what some call “Davos man.” And aside from a temporary resurgence of patriotism after September 11, Huntington documents how academic elites have led the way in devaluing patriotism and American history.
We rightly pride ourselves on our multiethnic, multiracial society. But as our society grows ever more diverse, how will we understand our national identity?
Huntington poses four possible solutions. The first is a creedal community whose identity exists only in a social contract embodied in the Declaration of Independence and other founding documents. This has historically provided cohesion. The next option is a bifurcated America, one that is bilingual and bicultural like Canada or Belgium. The third option is an exclusivist or imperial notion of America. And the last alternative, the one Huntington clearly favored, is a reinvigorated core culture and religion coupled with the earlier solution of a reinvigorated creedal community.
Can a Christian worldview inform us as a we wrestle with out national identity? Any kind of racially or ethnically intolerant society would be incompatible with Christian principles.
Further, we know that the core values of our creeds, which in particular promote the dignity of all people, resonate with Scripture and are worth preserving. American patriotism does not rest on jingoistic nationalism but on a universal creed that says, “All men are...endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”
Liberty is one of those unalienable rights. And this core value, also emphasized in Scripture, teaches us that we cannot force beliefs on others. Our founders understood, however, that freedom of religion is not synonymous with expunging religion from public life, a problem that I and others addressed last fall in the Manhattan Declaration. So if Huntington is in fact right that the U.S. needs a reinvigorated religious commitment, it won’t come from a nation-mandated religion but rather from a reinvigorated populace.
I believe, then, that for national identity to be salient in the midst of our changing society, we need a recommitment to our creeds, a respect for American history, and a proper role of patriotism, rooted in love of neighbor. Our founders’ Judeo-Christian heritage helped produce a culture in which moral responsibility, transcendent ethical principles, and the dignity of all people could flourish--a culture in which our creedal values made sense. This is why our role as leaven within society is so important, and why we must continue to bring biblical influence to the public square, reinvigorating society.
As we do so, we must guard against the easy tendency to embrace xenophobic notions or fall into equally perilous trap of promoting subcultural identities over national identity. People will not live with, let alone die for, a nation that has abandoned its religious moorings and adopted a creed that suggests we simply live together in cosmopolitan bliss. Millions of us, however, have been willing to live and die for beliefs rooted in our deepest convictions about God and man--convictions that were expressed so well in the stirring words of our national creed, the Declaration of Independence.
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