Something is weakening the moral fiber of the American people. We have always had couples live together without marriage, but we have not honored it as an acceptable lifestyle. We have always had children born out of wedlock, but we have never made it to be respectable. And we have never before regarded babies, conceived in wedlock or out, to be an inconvenience and destroyed them by the thousands through abortion. And this while barren couples yearn for a child to raise.

We have always had some who followed a life of perversion, but we have never before pushed through legislation to protect that way of life lest we offend the rights of an individual. We have never been this liberated before.

We have always had those who were guilty of criminal acts, but we have not put the rights of the accused above the rights of the victim.

If one single soul does not wish to listen for a moment to a public prayer, one which does not offend, even pleases the majority, we are told we must now eliminate prayer completely from all of public life.

We have always had addictive drugs, but not in the varieties we have now and not widely sold near public schools, even elementary schools. When perversion and addiction are justified as the expression of individual rights and call up a pestilence which threatens even the innocent, must the right of privacy preclude even testing to find where it is moving? What kind of individual freedom is this, anyway?

Did our young men die for this? We have always held the rights of the individual to be sovereign. But we have never before placed the collective rights of the majority in subjugation to the individual rights of any single citizen.

Any virtue, pressed to an extreme, becomes a vice; thrift becomes stinginess, generosity becomes wastefulness, self-confidence becomes pride, humility becomes weakness—and on and on. Individual rights as an ideal cannot endure except there be respect for the agency of others. There is no true freedom without responsibility. Freedom without restraint becomes tyranny of a new and fatal kind.

Source: Elder Boyd K. Packer
Address given 25 June 1989 at the Freedom Festival at Provo, UT.

Topics: Freedom, Loss of; Morality

Freedom certainly cannot exist under a system where the citizens are stripped of individuality and pressed into the classless society by a despotic state, where men and women are compelled to exist as faceless worker bees. That is slavery!

Neither can freedom long survive in a society where the rights of the individual are fanatically promoted regardless of what happens to society itself. The rights of the individual, the ideal, the virtue, when pressed to the extreme, like other virtues, will presently become a vice. Without some balance, activists, lawyers, legislators, judges, and courts who think they are protecting individual freedom are in fact fabricating a new and subtle and sinister kind of dictatorship.

Source: Elder Boyd K. Packer
Address given 25 June 1989 at the Freedom Festival at Provo, UT.

Topics: Freedom, Loss of; Virtue

The burning of the flag is an act which in itself becomes symbolic. It symbolizes the rejection of the Pledge of Allegiance. The Bill of Rights guarantees freedom of speech. Speech is made up of spoken or printed words. Words are words are words. Acts are acts are acts.

The willful destruction of the flag which belongs to all of us is the act of an extremist. A court decision legalizing the destruction of it to protect the rights of one protester is equally extreme.

Source: Elder Boyd K. Packer
Address given 25 June 1989 at the Freedom Festival at Provo, UT.

Topics: Freedom of Speech

There must be enough of us who have faith enough and who are moral enough to desire that which is right. Virtues, like love and liberty and patriotism, do not exist in general, they exist in particular. If morality exists at all, it exists in the individual heart and mind of the ordinary citizen. Such virtues cannot be isolated in any other place; not in the rocks or in the water, not in trees or air, not in animals or birds. If it exists at all, it exists in the human heart. Morality flourishes when the rank and file are free. It flourishes where a conscience is clear, where men have faith in God and are obedient to the restraints He has set upon human conduct.

Source: Elder Boyd K. Packer
Address given 25 June 1989 at the Freedom Festival at Provo, UT.

Topics: Morality; Virtue

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.

Source: John Adams

Topics: America, Heritage

But we who love the word of God need not depend on the dictionary alone for our understanding of the concept of freedom. We can study the scriptures to gain spiritual insight. In analyzing the standard works in the English language, I find that the word freedom appears in thirty-three verses of holy scripture. Twenty-seven of those thirty-three verses are in the Book of Mormon. To me, it is quite remarkable that the number of verses with the terms freedom or liberty in the Book of Mormon is nearly double that of the other books of scripture combined!

Source: Elder Russell M. Nelson
Address given 1 July 1990 at the Freedom Festival at Provo, UT.

Topics: Freedom

Democracy alone cannot promise perfect freedom, but its freedoms promise opportunity. And those freedoms legitimize the privilege of an individual’s pursuit of happiness.

Yet freedom does nothing to guide that search. It is much easier to advocate freedom than it is to determine what to do with it. That is one of the challenges facing newly liberated countries.

Indeed, Fourth of July celebrations will be different this year. Throughout our lifetimes, many have understood freedom solely in terms of an ideological struggle. We have been taught to contrast freedom to bondage, liberty to totalitarianism, capitalism to communism, or democracy to despotism.

Now as communism has collapsed in some nations, and as new democracies have arisen, the tempo in the battle of ideology winds down. President Havel described 1989’s “revolutionary changes in Europe as those which will enable us to escape from the rather antiquated straitjacket of this bi-polar view of the world” (Address to joint session of the United States Congress, February 21, 1990).

The remarkable crumbling of communism now brings us to a new era of freedom without the foe to which we have been accustomed virtually all of our lives. But as the zealous fervor for communism wanes, so might the zealous fervor for democracy also fade. That risk is real.

Source: Elder Russell M. Nelson
Address given 1 July 1990 at the Freedom Festival at Provo, UT.

Topics: Communism; Democracy

Indeed, the root of freedom is responsibility. The stem of freedom is discipline. The flower of freedom is vigilance.

Responsibility, discipline, and vigilance can be dispensed neither from the U.S. Treasury nor from private donations. This perception was shared by the Deputy Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia, with whom my associates and I spoke earlier this year. When we asked what specific aid could be rendered to Czechoslovakia’s new democratic government, he replied: “We don’t need material goods or technology. We need a new spirit. We need moral values. We need the Judeo-Christian ethic back in our curriculum. Please help us to make this a time of spiritual renewal for our nation.”

In April of this year we met with the Minister of Education in the Republic of Estonia. We asked him a similar question. He replied that the Estonian economy is changing rapidly. He noted an urgent need to educate his people differently. He said: “There is much work to be done in rewriting our text books. We have the hope that religion can be taught in all of the schools and that the spirit of Christianity can be woven within the fabric of our curriculum.”

As he made those remarks I thought of the irony that strong forces in these United States are trying to eradicate all evidences of religion or piety from our public schools. Meanwhile, citizens in these European nations that have been so deprived of religious influence now feel the detrimental impact of that loss.

Source: Elder Russell M. Nelson
Address given 1 July 1990 at the Freedom Festival at Provo, UT.

Topics: Freedom; Responsibility

He [George Washington] was, indeed, in every sense of the words, a wise, a good, and a great man . . . . It may truly be said, that never did nature and fortune combine more perfectly to make a man great, and to place him in the same constellation with whatever worthies have merited from man an everlasting remembrance. For his was the singular destiny and merit, of leading the armies of his country successfully through an arduous war, for the establishment of its independence, new in its forms and principles, until it had settled down into a quiet and orderly train; and of scrupulously obeying the laws through the whole of his career, civil and military, of which the history of the world furnishes no other example.

Source: Thomas Jefferson
Personal letter to Dr. Walter Jones
Monticello, January 2, 1814.

Topics: America, Heritage

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