Teach Them Well—Michael Potemra, page 54Making Patriots,

another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

Berns quotes these words for two reasons. First, they demonstrate how ingrained in the American tradition is the concept of natural individual rights. Other countries had magnanimously declared that they would “tolerate” even those of their fellow citizens who were Lutherans, or Catholics, or Jews. There is no question of that kind of cultural arrogance in the United States: Here, one can be a Baptist, or a Catholic, or a Jew, or anything else one chooses, not on the sufferance of one’s fellow citizens, but because one is a human being endowed by God with natural rights and freedoms deserving of all protection by a just society.

WB

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Walter Berns

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another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

Berns quotes these words for two reasons. First, they demonstrate how ingrained in the American tradition is the concept of natural individual rights. Other countries had magnanimously declared that they would “tolerate” even those of their fellow citizens who were Lutherans, or Catholics, or Jews. There is no question of that kind of cultural arrogance in the United States: Here, one can be a Baptist, or a Catholic, or a Jew, or anything else one chooses, not on the sufferance of one’s fellow citizens, but because one is a human being endowed by God with natural rights and freedoms deserving of all protection by a just society.