Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. promoted a dream unfulfilled from the nation’s founding but always in the nation’s fiber and soul. He promoted nothing radical, nothing untoward, because what he promoted first and foremost was the concept of liberty. That liberty is based upon the understanding that all men are created in the image and likeness of God and, because of that, every person has dignity and God-given rights upon which no government may ever justly tread.
He wanted no “special rights”– no special privileges for his brothers and sisters. He wanted them to be treated as God would have them treated, and he wanted this for all of America. He quoted the prophet Isaiah for the “dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”
“And when this happens,” King famously said, “when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’”
And that also is the dream of the organization I lead, the Alliance Defending Freedom. Our focus is on religious liberty, which is under assault today. Those who follow their faith are being told that “the price of citizenship” is that they surrender their most basic beliefs if they wish to engage in commerce and the public square. This was not what Dr. King dreamed. But we, today, can look to the day he called for — a day in which the rights of all are recognized because of their inherent dignity, not as some fabrication of the state or of the courts that becomes yet another limitation on the founding vision.
We should all continue to have that dream.
— Alan Sears is president of Alliance Defending Freedom.