Chinu,
Thanks for posting that article. The Lincoln quote crystallized for me the significance of this election as a whole and the gay rights issue in particular. I'd been reflecting on my heated rant trying to put it perspective, understand it.
And I have been impressed by the quality of posts here the past 24 hours especially from Dale, Karen and Rambi to name a few and by their passion in particular. These are our best centrists and were uncharacteristically passionate. Then it dawned on me that this is not a wide-eyed liberal or even a religious issue. This is a centrist issue, that it cuts to the core of what this nation represents. This glorious experiment, as Karen put it effusively, is alive and well - the reason why this election has been so inspiring here and the world over and the reason why Prop 8 was so disheartening.
I went and found the entire paragraph of Lincoln's letter and posted it below, well worth a read - smart guy that Lincoln. And the Jefferson dude is not bad either <g>
BUT, soberly, it is now no child's play to save the
principles of Jefferson from total overthrow in this nation. One would state with great confidence that he could convince any sane child that the simpler propositions of Euclid are true; but nevertheless he would fail, utterly, with one who should deny the definitions and axioms. The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society. And yet they are denied and evaded, with no small show of success. One dashingly calls them "glittering generalities." Another bluntly calls them "self-evident lies." And others insidiously argue that they apply only to "superior races." These expressions, differing in form, are identical in object and effect - the supplanting the principles of free government, and restoring those of classification, caste, and legitimacy. They would delight a convocation of crowned heads plotting against the people. They are the vanguard - the miners and sappers of returning despotism. We must repulse them, or they will subjugate us. This is a world of compensation; and he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave.
Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God, cannot long retain it.
All honor to Jefferson - to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there that today and in all coming days it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.
Your Obedient servant,
A. Lincoln. |
