Every November since it was first officially established in 1863, Americans have gathered with family and friends for Thanksgiving. The large feasts held that day all across America commemorate the initial friendship between the pilgrim settlers at Plymouth Colony and the Wampanoag Indians.
The pilgrims had fled religious persecution in England, only to find they could barely survive the harsh conditions of the New World. Without the help of the Indians, they might not have.
More than 170 years after the pilgrims’ arrival, the United States Constitution and the original Bill of Rights would be ratified. These would provide the unprecedented freedom that remains America’s greatest treasure to this day. The First Amendment, had it existed in their time, could have spared the pilgrims their trip altogether, with its absolute guarantee of state non-interference in religion.
The First Amendment’s accompanying freedoms of speech and the press — essential to the openness of American society — remain the most robust in the world, even among today’s other economically advanced democracies.
America’s Founding Fathers were in many ways products of their own time. But in their understanding of how a free society could flourish and avoid relapsing into tyranny, they were visionaries. They understood that the near-absolute freedom to criticize rulers and their laws was not merely a concession to the individual, but a force that would help hold society together. To this day, it provides an open outlet for even the sharpest disagreements, which previous governments and monarchs had ruthlessly suppressed with violence.
Americans are so accustomed to the First Amendment that they take it for granted and feel almost infinite confidence that the courts will defend it from all threats. They look askance at practices in other countries — even Canada, where the wrong sort of comment can land one before a tribunal. They look back in horror to periods of American history where the First Amendment was disrespected — particularly in the service of preserving the institutions of slavery and segregation — and take heart that such a thing could never happen again.
But there are always petty would-be tyrants who cannot handle criticism and who lack the temperament of a George Washington. This year, Democrats faced an onslaught of ads criticizing their conduct in office, and 54 of the party’s Senators responded by trying to amend the Constitution to weaken its protection of political speech. At one point, Obama’s lawyers also briefly argued (before sheepishly reversing themselves) that they could ban books on political candidates in election years.
Freedom of religion has also come under assault recently. The Obama administration argued before the Supreme Court that it had the right to dictate to a church who would serve as its minister. The mayor of Houston briefly tried to subpoena the sermons of five pastors who had spoken out against a policy they considered detrimental to their flocks’ spiritual health. A decision by faceless bureaucrats in the Department of Health and Human Services on mandated contraceptive coverage — not a law, but a regulation — is still being defended in court by the administration, even though it purports to command some believers to choose between following the longstanding teachings of their churches and their freedom to participate in the economy.
The offices of the Washington Examiner are surrounded by all the branches of the federal government — the Supreme Court, Congress, the White House and a laundry list of federal agencies and law enforcement bodies. And yet each day, we can use this forum to condemn bad public policy, corruption, incompetence and sheer stupidity from our nation’s leaders without fear of prosecution. And it’s all because of those words enshrined in the Constitution by our nation’s Founders, “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”
This Thanksgiving, we are grateful for the First Amendment. But we aren’t complacent about its guarantees. Appearing at a Federalist Society dinner earlier this month, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito said, “I have some concerns about what the future may hold for First Amendment freedoms.” Alito explained that many people assume that as societies mature, freedom will naturally expand, but that there’s no guarantee that will always be the case.
To borrow a phrase of Ronald Reagan, the First Amendment is never more than one generation away from extinction.
