Posted by
JayPeriod on Monday, July 30, 2007 9:33:15 PM
We all love our freedoms. They are guaranteed in the Constitution. We have freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to pursue our own course in life. Those freedoms cannot be taken advantage of, though.
Freedom is what our country was founded on. These freedoms need to be protected at all costs. When someone speaks out, whether we agree or not, they are exercising their freedom. They are guaranteed that.
The one thing, though, that we are not guaranteed is that there will be no repercussions from our exercise of those freedoms. Yet, when someone is caught by the consequences of their actions, they often seem surprised.
We see this more and more in the court system. When a criminal is tried, lawyers, especially the ACLU, want to blame everyone but the criminal for the crime. They blame their parents, society, culture, just anybody else. They do whatever they can not to take the blame.
This has bled over into the judges. We see softer and softer sentences for hardened criminals. The judges are concerned about reforming the criminal rather than punishing them and letting them experience consequences for their actions. As we remove more and more of these consequences, the result is that there is no deterrent to crime and anarchy will surely follow.
As a parent, I do my best to protect my children, but the one thing I can't do is completely remove consequences from their lives. If I ever did that, they would not be deterred from further careless actions. Some might say if I loved them I'd protect them from any possible harm, but what would that really teach them?
If we never allow people to suffer the consequences of their actions, society will suffer. If we are to ever have a society in which freedoms are truly cherished, we must allow people to suffer consequences. Simply, there is no personal freedom without personal responsibility.