by John D. Johnson

Created on: June 13, 2009   Last Updated: June 16, 2009

The thing most often forgotten about freedom is that it is wed to responsibility. Like an ever-accompanying shadow, duty is the natural companion of liberty. It does not matter which freedom we examine: that of speech, or of the press, or of assembly. Where there is freedom, there is also the attendant obligation to use it well. Just as heat is bound to fire, and as a stone is one with its rigidity, so also is freedom tethered to obligation.

The sins of our age have disfigured freedom. They have forced us to understand it in the most dismal sense. Having violently torn freedom from its natural duties, our culture has witnessed the spread of wickedness and the persecution of goodness. Liberty, its meaning now corrupted, is now in many minds that realm in which evil must be allowed to run berserk while righteousness sits confined to a tight, constricted space.

As a result, what is today called freedom is often a despicable counterfeit. Under its false banner, patients in various states of physical impairment are tossed out of humanity's ranks like so much garbage, shoved off the cliff of death by crooked judges and their perversions of the law. The plight of the victims is either ignored or distorted while the evil that smothers them calls itself justice. Judicial tyrants, convinced they sit above decency and morality, occupy their lofty courtroom thrones, assuming for themselves imperial powers unknown to our Constitution and despised by its architects.

False freedom sees to it that free speech is denied those who peaceably dissent against a whole host of corrosive trends while those very trends, such as the outrage of abortion and the misguided push for gay "marriage", proceed with ever-dwindling resistance.

False freedom persecutes charitable speech in schools and in the halls of government because such expression dares reference God, but it allows and even defends the wide distribution of the most repulsive obscenities spewed by so-called entertainers.

False freedom attacks our national symbols, telling us that every American Flag must be subject to desecration while the most disgusting insults and blasphemies must be left free to circulate unregulated through media channels if free speech is to endure.

False freedom's noisy refrain, constantly blaring forth today, is that in order to preserve our nation, we must tolerate even those things which threaten our nation, including speech that corrupts the young, imperils national security, or disrupts civil

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