Steve Frey
It is great to see our Constitution in action. Recently, multiple groups have used their constitutional rights to let Congress and the administration know that they disagree with the decisions and policies of different individuals or legislators. The protests represent democracy in action.
The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Our Founding Fathers, from their own difficult experience, knew that freedom of speech and assembly would be essential to our new republic.
They experienced restrictions by the Crown that prevented them from gathering and speaking out in objection to taxes without representation and other acts with which they disagreed. They fought for their rights. Many of them died for those rights.
The framers of the Constitution, men like James Madison, George Washington, Ben Franklin and George Mason were called Patriots.
For the purposes of this column, we’ll call those protesters using the right to peaceably assemble, speak out, and petition the government for a redress of grievances modern day patriots.
Many often disagree with protesters. For example, there was the Women’s March in early 2017, where millions in the United States and around the world protested the statements and ideology expressed during the presidential campaign.
Many Americans disagreed and claimed that the protesters were just sore losers. The women who marched, of course, felt that they had real concerns and wanted to share them.
Football players took a stand by taking a knee to protest injustices toward black people. They insisted that they were patriotic. They were just opposed to racial injustice and not being disrespectful to service members, the flag or police, but that was the twist that was put on the protests by people who opposed their viewpoint and wanted them stopped.
Perhaps we should remember what President Harry Truman said about trying to stop protests, “Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.”
Last week, high school students, many in our own area, protested the fact that their fellow students were being murdered in schools around the country.
They felt enough was enough and something had to be done to remember the victims and stop the slaughter.
Of course, some people put them down and even called the student leaders vile names or said they were actors. They didn’t agree with their viewpoints, so they mocked them, said they were immature or uninformed children and dismissed their ideas.
If you saw these eloquent young patriots speak, however, you knew that they were genuinely concerned about the killing of their fellow students and just wanted it to stop.
We have seen other patriotic movements backed by free speech and the right to assemble change the course of history in the United States, so the patriots who wrote our Constitution and amendments were very prescient regarding preserving and promoting democracy.
The Civil Rights movement is a great example. Patriotic Americans around the country marched, were attacked, called vulgar names, and many killed, to achieve equal rights for all.
They persisted and our country began to approach in reality our core belief that “all men are created equal.”
Thomas Jefferson had strong feelings about free thought and expression that related directly to this movement: “To preserve the freedom of the human mind and freedom of the press, every spirit should be ready to devote itself to martyrdom; for as long as we may think as we will, and speak as we think, the condition of man will proceed in improvement.”
During the Vietnam War, patriotic Americans protested against the government, which, year after year, sent more and more soldiers to their deaths without a real plan to end that conflict.
At the time, the protesters were called communists, leftists, traitors and told to leave the country. They were beaten and some killed, but they persisted, the movement grew, and just as with civil rights, the vast majority of Americans joined in the cause and the war was finally ended.
U. S. Supreme Court justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, “If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought — not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.”
Whenever there are protesting patriots, there are those who condemn them, call them names, say they’re unpatriotic and even attack them, but Holmes was saying that the Constitution provides for freedom of speech, thought, and assembly so that all viewpoints can be heard, even those we disagree with most vehemently.
Yes, high school students practiced democracy in action to express their unwillingness to be killed in their classrooms, football players protested the killing of their fellow citizens and women took to the streets to protest against hatred, discrimination and abuse. The patriots of the American Revolution would be proud.
“If men are to be precluded from offering their sentiments on a matter, which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences that can invite the consideration of mankind, reason is of no use to us; the freedom of speech may be taken away, and dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep, to the slaughter.” George Washington said this a couple hundred years ago, but his words ring true today.
You may not question the reason for a war until your children are killed. You may not worry about civil rights until someone you know is lynched because of his race. You may not think about sexual abuse until your daughter is sexually assaulted.
You may not concern yourself with climate change until you experience weeks of extreme heat or cold, rising seas and violent storms.
You may not worry about health care until a relative dies because he can’t afford medicine or care.
You may not have had to drink from a blacks-only drinking fountain, or be harassed because you are an immigrant, or be paid less because you are a woman, or have a gas pipeline placed in your backyard, or have your drinking water contaminated with lead or coal waste, or have your Social Security and Medicare threatened, or have your child shot to death with a semi-automatic weapon in her classroom. The list goes on…
When these things happen directly to them, some are moved to do something to protest. Other caring people see it happen to others and are moved to protest on their behalf.
It probably has as much to do with “love thy neighbor as thyself” as it does the Constitution.
Yet, in many cases, there will be those with closed minds who will viciously attack the protesters, egged on by the talking heads on a cable news channel who sometimes wrap themselves in the flag, use a slanted interpretation of the Constitution, and/or express their own personal prejudices. Sadly, they are very often the people who get angrier at students walking out of school to protest than they do about students being carried out in body bags.
According to our Constitution, freedom to dissent is a right; it is patriotic to do so. Our Founding Fathers have a clear and direct connection to the protesting patriots of today.
That is why freedom of speech and assembly are purposely and prominently in the First Amendment of our Constitution, and why, on so many occasions in our history, they have helped us to become a better nation.
We should listen to the concerns of others with open minds. They are not being unpatriotic; rather, they are being patriots, standing up for what they believe is right. They love our flag, our democracy, and our country as much as anyone.
If we hear them, we may come to realize that there is truth in their words, and we may be moved to join them to strive for what is right and just for our country. Of course, in a democracy, we may also respectfully disagree.
We can be pretty certain of one thing: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and our other Founding Fathers would be listening, and they would be proud of our democracy and the fidelity with which our Constitution still safeguards the rights they fought so hard to attain for all of us.
Steve Frey is a writer and CEO of Ascendant Educational Services based in Radford.
