Let’s reflect this holiday weekend on values of 1776

This Independence Day weekend, we Americans celebrate and renew our commitment to the values set forth in 1776 by leaders who felt it was important to explain why our ancestors no longer wanted to live under British rule.

Why? Read the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. It is a clear explanation of Americans’ insistence on the rights of individuals:


The Declaration goes on in great detail to list British government violations of the rights of individuals. Note that numerous infringements were justified by the British government by claims they were necessary to protect the public. Consider also that among the cited actions by king and Parliament were some limiting the colonists’ economic freedoms.

It is worth asking ourselves this weekend whether our nation’s founders, if alive today, would believe that we have lived up to the insistence on individual liberty set forth in the Declaration. If they were writing it today, would their list of objections to government behavior include some of the steps our governments, state and federal, have taken in response to the COVID-19 epidemic?

As they demonstrated during the Revolutionary War, the founders were not insensitive to the necessity of curtailing some freedoms during times of genuine emergency. Our history shows that all too often, the severity of such curbs was out of proportion to necessity.

Are we just now emerging from such a period?

Time will tell ­– it must, through careful examination of why government officials took the epidemic-related actions they did ­– whether overreach has occurred.

Already, we have evidence that some government officials have been sensitive to individual liberties. Some put many COVID-19 tactics in the form of strong suggestions or orders that were not enforced stringently. Others clamped down hard, even threatening to arrest violators — and sometimes carrying through with that.

Did government go too far? Would the nation’s founders, knowing what our governors knew and when they knew it, have thought the COVID-19 response was acceptable?

How would Benjamin Franklin, who in 1755 warned that, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety,” feel about the epidemic-related emergency orders?

Would he and other founders decide that we Americans in 2020 are upholding the values we celebrate this weekend — or have abandoned them?

That is a real question, not a rhetorical device. But it is one that this Independence Day weekend — and in view of other threats to our freedoms, not just those involving the coronavirus outbreak — Americans should be asking.

It comes down simply to this: What do we mean by “unalienable rights?”


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