Memorial Day thoughts from Patrick Henry

[bleever]

Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, entrusted with oversight of the executive branch's intelligence programs, and bearer of the responsibility of assuring that our liberties and civil rights are not infringed upon by overzealous or abusive intrusions into the private lives of Americans, has said that "You don't have civil liberties when you're dead."

It is fitting then that we should consider the words of Patrick Henry from his "Give Me Liberty of Give Me Death" speech.

In a column in today's San Francisco Chronicle, Gary M. Galles revisits this speech, and here are a few excerpts that are especially relevant to the conflicts we now face about whether we need to bend or abandon our constitutional rights in order to remain "safe":

"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. ...be extremely cautious, watchful, jealous of your liberty; for instead of securing your rights, you may lose them forever."

"Those nations who have...been the victims of their own folly...lost their freedom."

"...I address my most fervent prayer to prevent our adopting a system destructive to liberty."

"No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by...frequent recurrence to fundamental principles."

"If our descendants be worthy of the name of Americans they will preserve and hand down to their latest posterity the transactions of the present times...to preserve their liberty."

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/05/29/EDGDOIJI5N1.DTL


Happy Memorial Day to all DUers who continue to fight for the notion that our freedom is preserved in times of adversity not by abandoning our constitutional rights as a peacetime luxury, but by defending them as our greatest strength, and the foundation upon which America has been built, has survived, and has prospered.