ALLIANCE
FOR CITIZENS RIGHTS
ALLIANCE
FOR CITIZENS RIGHTS
A SPEECH
delivered at the Veterans' Rally for
Chief Justice Roy Moore
by Ken Freeman
Good morning. My name is Kenneth Freeman. I am a Viet Nam veteran and chairman of a group called "The Alliance for Citizens Rights".
A friend of mine once told me "that we only build monuments to dead people because as long as you're alive, you still have time to mess up". I thought that was pretty funny when he said it, but you know, there is a lot of truth to that statement if you are an American.
But I have noticed that in other parts of the world, where societies are not free, there are statues and monuments that men have built to themselves. Totalitarian rulers and power hungry politicians build such things to symbolize their power. But when such rulers fall, so do their memorials.
Whereas, among free peoples, our leaders are viewed at an historical distance, clarified through time and understanding and our memorials are erected not according to what power and glory they took for themselves during life, but according to what they gave for their fellow man.
Ask yourself, where are the statues of Marx and Lenin now?
Ask yourself, how long will the visages of Chairman Mao and Saddam Hussein look down upon their people?
"We the people," build memorials to our great men after they are gone; to men deemed great because of what they believed and because these men had the courage to act upon their convictions. Because of this, we as a nation have honored and come to believe in them. And so, their monuments and their memories will endure from generation to generation.
We are here today to defend the founding principles of our republic, as embodied in the Ten Commandments. So I thought, where could one find better words in defense of this monument than on other patriotic memorials?
But to digress for a moment, let me give you a little history. After my service as a Navy pilot in Viet Nam, I went to work as an airline pilot. I retired recently from that position. But for nearly thirty years, I had the great privilege of traveling to every corner of our great nation. I have met people from all over America and I have learned to truly appreciate these so-called grass roots people. They are like no other people on earth. They are the real heart of America.
On these journeys one of my favorite overnight stops was, believe it or not, Rapid City, South Dakota. The hotel was not that good and the food was nothing to brag about, but I always liked it there, because I looked forward to the mornings. On those mornings, shortly after daybreak, when the sky was clear and cool we would lift off and climb up into the morning sunlight and fly past Mount Rushmore. The sky behind the mountain would be a deep blue and the sunlight would be full upon the faces of some of America's greatest men.
For a few moments I could gaze full into the faces on the mountain, and know the dignity of Washington, the wisdom of Jefferson, the twinkle of self-confidence in Teddy Roosevelt's eye, and see the resolute, sorrowful countenance of Lincoln.
There, carved in stone are the likenesses of some of the men who helped shape America. Mount Rushmore is certainly not a religious monument but it is a memorial that "we the people" built to great leaders who guided our nation through times of turmoil. These men had a clear vision of what America stood for, what American freedom really meant. They knew the under-penning that made her great.
I am just an ordinary citizen, so I will ask these great men to speak for me; to let their words, words now chiseled in stone on their own memorials, tell us of the value they themselves placed on the foundation of our nation. I will ask them about the Ten Commandments and religions place in government.
First as always is George Washington, the father of our country who said of religion:
"I am sure that never was a people, who had more reason to acknowledge a Divine interposition in their affairs, than those of the United States and I should be pained to believe that they have forgotten .......the omnipotence of that God who is alone able to protect them."
Of government he said: "True religion affords to government its surest support. Religion and morality are the essential pillars of civil society."
In our nations capital, named after George Washington himself, stands his personal memorial. This magnificent white stone obelisk reaches 555 feet into the sky. As you climb the stairway on the inside of the monument you will pass the following verses among the carved memorial stones: "In God we trust, God and our native land, and May heaven to the union continue its' beneficence." At it's highest point, engraved on the metal cap are the words "Praise be to God."
Next on Rushmore is Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence who wrote:
"God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the mind of the people that these liberties are of the Gift of God?"
He also declared that religion is, "Deemed in other countries incompatible with good government and yet proved by our experience to be its best support."
Theodore Roosevelt is next. Teddy said:
"Every thinking man, when he thinks, realizes that the teachings of the Bible are so interwoven and entwined with our whole civic and social life that it would be literally impossible for us to figure ourselves what that life would be if these standards were removed. We would lose almost all the standards by which we now judge both public and private morals, all the standards towards which we, with more or less resolution, strive to raise ourselves."
Last on the mountain is Abraham Lincoln, who wrote:
"We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven...but we have forgotten God......and we have vainly imagined in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own".
"Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become...... too proud to pray to the God that made us."
He also said, "The only assurance of our national safety is to lay our foundation in morality and religion."
The last act of Congress ever signed by Lincoln was one requiring that the motto, "in God we trust" should hereafter be inscribed upon all our national coins.
These American presidents were obviously religious men and they all spoke of the morals and the principles upon which our government is founded. The source of those principles is summarized in the Ten Commandments.
But they were also wise men that judged life by results as well as by rituals. They were prudent men. A prudent man would ask, "what are the results of a form of government, of a style of religion? How do the practitioners of their faith or governmental system prosper in life? Are their people right thinking? Are they generous? Are they productive? Are they just? Do they allow freedom to others as well as themselves?" These things are a true test of a society.
To understand the value of our Judeo-Christian system of government you don't need to be religious, you just need to be reasonable; you don't need to be fundamentalist, you just need to be factual. Taken from the purely secular viewpoint, putting aside all religious considerations, a prudent man would see, that nowhere on present earth, nowhere in past history, and probably nowhere in the future of man will you find a system of government that brings more prosperity, more freedom and more religious choices than that of the United States of America and the Constitution on which it is founded.
It doesn't matter whether you are a born-again Christian or a born-in-America Patriot, or both; History has shown that the Judeo -Christian value system our nation is founded upon has produced the freest, most prosperous, most generous people the world has ever known.
There are many other great men in our history whose faces do not appear on Mount Rushmore. Some have their own memorials and some have only those memorials built in the hearts and minds of their fellow man. There are Founding Fathers like John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams who warn us lest we fail. Listen to their words:
From John Adams:
"We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion... Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
John Quincy Adams perhaps said it best:
"Men, in a word, must necessarily be controlled either by a power within them or by a power without them; either by the word of God or by the strong arm of man: either by the Bible or by the bayonet."
Then there is James Madison, the man who should be the authority in this matter, since he was the chief architect of the Constitution. The very same Constitution by the way, that is now being misquoted and manipulated in an attempt to remove the Ten Commandments Monument from our Alabama Supreme Court building.
Listen to Madison's words:
"We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it, we have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government, upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God."
It is hard to say it plainer than that! And he was the chief writer of the constitution!
But to many Americans today, these great men don't seem to matter anymore -- our courts and some political factions and our federal government don't seem to think so anyway. America no longer even owns the ground on which our greatest monuments stand: The Statue of Liberty, Constitution Hall and the Liberty Bell, all these precious American Historical sites have been given away -- signed over to the United Nations as World Heritage Sites. Most of the National Parks set aside by Teddy Roosevelt "for the enjoyment of the American people" now belong to the United Nations as "UN Bio-Diversity Sites" and are beyond our nation's control. We have thrown our Heritage away.
These places are not the United Nations' heritage; they are America's heritage. They are our heritage! I say that the time has come to take our country back! And the place to start is right here today, with a strong defense of the moral and ethical foundations of our nation, "The Ten Commandments" and of the brave man who is fighting for America, Judge Roy Moore. We are a nation built on the moral principals summarized in ten sentences; ten sentences that have no ambiguity, no uncertainty, and no wiggle room.
The Ten Commandments summarize the basis of our structures of government, of our ethics and of our moral codes. To remove them is to remove the very ground on which we stand as a nation and as a people.
We are gathered here today to say that this is a battle worth fighting! To the enemies of freedom, we are here to say, "Thou shalt not" destroy this nation from within. And that "we the people" shall defend America from all her enemies- foreign or domestic!!!!!!
I will close with a quote from one of the greatest Christian gentleman our nation ever produced:
"I pray that our merciful Father in heaven may protect and direct us. In that case I fear no odds and no numbers."
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . General Robert E. Lee
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