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Independence Day: Do not forget what we celebrate

Today our nation celebrates 242 years since our founders signed a document that declared our independence from Great Britain. That same document declares a few other things:

That “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

But also that “all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

By the waning years of the 19th Century, this country’s star had risen dramatically, and the statue “Liberty Enlightening the World” was dedicated in New York Harbor, complete with a tablet bearing the Roman numerals for July 4, 1776. The light of freedom unleashed on that date in Philadelphia now stood as a beacon for all people.

Over the past nearly 250 years there has been hardly a generation that did not see fighting and sacrifice to preserve that freedom –and not just for us. For all men.

Do not forget what we celebrate today, ladies and gentlemen.

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“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Benjamin Franklin

“I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in providence, for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.”

John Adams

“Equal and exact justice to all men … freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus; and trial by juries impartially selected,these principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us.”

Thomas Jefferson

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