Illustrations by Louise McCune As Americans, there are certain ideals for which we stand, such as freedom, liberty, and justice. Instilled deep within our hearts, these values must be protected by Americans from government intrusion. The Supreme Court, protecting the liberties guaranteed in the Constitution, has ruled that religious institutions “act as critical buffers between the individual and the power of the State,” serving as...
...on over the fetus. Women and men should have complete control over when, where, and how they choose to have sex and establish a family. But who has control over the existence of the resulting zygote? A woman should have every liberty to make decisions for herself, but does she also hold the liberty of the being developing inside of her? Does she have the right to regulate the fetus, or does the fetus have its own rights? Women should have access...
...gned for sporting the burqa in a town just east of Paris. Though there has been ample coverage of the ban in the European media, much of it has been of a disappointing quality, focusing more on the winsome notion of religious liberty or the academic anxiety of a clash of civilizations rather than the logistics of the French quagmire. When pundits and social commentators do address the situation, more often than not it is to admonish the law as dr...
...vidual-based, frontier mentality and the expectation of protection and security from the richest and strongest federal government in the world. President Franklin D. Roosevelt recognized the falseness of the dichotomy between liberty and security, and between freedom and equality, in the mid-twentieth century. His biographer, James MacGregor Burns, puts Roosevelt’s belief this way: “Individual political liberty and collective welfare were not onl...
...just act like there’s one point of view,” he continues. “Get on the table so students can think about a range of potential viewpoints.” Foner uses this approach extensively in his own textbook Give Me Liberty!, first published in 2005 and adopted by over 600 high schools and colleges. In it, he touches on certain events in American history that other historians would exclude, such as the suppression of free speech during...
Art by Taimur Malik “History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visible direction set by liberty and the Author of Liberty,” President Bush remarked in his second inauguration speech. There is a reference to God here, but also, perhaps, a reference to Hegel. For Bush, the “visible direction” is, indeed, very visible: “We are the nation that saved liberty in Europe and liberated death camps and helped raise up democracies and...
...onal activism in support of the Palestinian cause. The Arab revolutions rose out of repression, economic hardship, and authoritarian government. Collectively, an end to Israeli apartheid is integral to this wider struggle for liberty. The Arab Spring demonstrates that the Middle East is not a monolith. There are competing ideas of what liberation looks like. Palestinians too are fighting oppressive forces to determine the future that they collect...
...ent bailouts, millions of Americans lost their homes and savings, and yet it was the corporations that had their debts absolved. In response, the Declaration of the Occupation, approved by consensus by the General Assembly at Liberty Park on September 29, reads, “We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here...
...etter understanding. As such, his aim is not only to reject all existing competing interpretations of the Constitution, but also to preempt the development of new legal understanding. Even though Justice Scalia is at complete liberty to make his view known to the public, I believe his assertion is fundamentally at odds with the underlying premise of our constitutional democracy—that we, the people, ferret out the democratic truth as we go along a...
...olitics, on policies, on failures, and Bush retorted with a similar tack, focusing on his leadership skills. But then he added something extra: “And we’ll continue to spread freedom. I believe in the transformational power of liberty. I believe that the free Iraq is in this nation’s interests. I believe a free Afghanistan is in this nation’s interest.” In one fell swoop, Bush couched his radical foreign policy in the terms of enlightened, self-in...
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