| July 1, 1997 |  |
| July 1, 1997 | |
 At The Inaugural Ceremony | Thank you also to the many special guests who are here with us, honoring us with their presence: Archbishop McCarrick, Bishop Arias and the other religious leaders who are here, the community leaders who are here, and our many visiting governmental leaders, from all levels of government, including Governor Christie Whitman and Congressman Robert Menendez. |
Of course, most of all, I want to thank you, the people. You see the City Council and I sitting on this stage with our families. But the truth is that you are family to us also. In fact, when I look at you, one of the most amazing things about this day is that four years ago I had gotten to know some of you well, but there were many in the crowd whom I did not know. Now, as I look out and see you, I see good friends seat after seat after seat, and that is an incredible experience, so I just want to thank you for all of your love and support.
As Mayor, it is certainly true that my primary areas of responsibility concern material and social issues, not spiritual issues like whether people are happy, or love one another. But, heck, I only get to give an inaugural address once every four years. So today l am going to indulge myself and address my comments to spiritual concerns such as how we can create a community where people are happy, where they have a sense that their lives have meaning and purpose, and where they find happiness, meaning, and purpose in loving one another.
This is a dangerous thing to be doing, not only because I will be treading on unusual territory for a mayor, but also, perhaps most dangerously, because I haven't had much time since the election to write out these thoughts. So I'll be winging it a little bit here. But I still want to give it a try.
To begin the effort, allow me to take us a step back from the cultural trees immediately in front of us and share a historical perspective on the cultural forest which surrounds us. Taking this historical perspective will help us to realize that the way we think about spiritual and moral questions today isn't the only way one can think of them.
This country was born during a radically different period, known as the Enlightenment or Age of Reason, when people believed that many social and political traditions were imperfect. Truth could still be known, our founders believed, but instead of believing that tradition was always true, they believed that tradition was often corrupt, that truth was independent of tradition, and that truth, indeed, required that we change our lives and reform society to conform with it. Severed from tradition, the moral responsibility of the individual became to live by God's natural law of morality, and the good society came to be seen as that which was reformed according to God's natural law of justice.
Most of our forbearers believed in the God of the Bible: a personal God who could physically resurrect the dead. Some conceived of God differently. But all believed that there is a power greater than human will, a power which determines natural law and which establishes, thereby, standards against which we can judge both the morality of our lives and the justness of our society.
This led to a tremendous hopefulness, because people believed not only that truth existed, but again, that we could build a better society upon the foundation of uncorrupted truth. Such hopefulness encouraged change. Indeed, this era saw not only the birth of the United States, but changes all throughout the world: political changes, economic changes, social changes, and intellectual changes. Indeed, this Age of Reason came to be also known as the Age of Revolution.
Progress came in many different ways. But there was also a tremendous amount of disorientation that came as a result of that rapid change. And later, as this Age of Reason and Revolution passed through the Romantic Period and into the Modern Era, some thinkers began to question whether objective truth exists at all. When traditional notions of truth were being challenged every day, part of what resulted was the notion that the truth of a matter might be of a subjective or relative quality. Indeed, it is the belief in the subjectiveness of truth which most defines the Modern Era.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau predated the Modern Era, but his thinking helped to lay its foundation. Rather than considering human law legitimate to the degree that it properly reflects natural law, he rooted his ideas on law in social contract theory, and argued that the legitimacy of human law is a function of the degree to which it reflects democratic consensus and concurrence. In 1848, Karl Marx attacked even this basis for law. Challenging the moral legitimacy of social contract theory, he argued that social contracts are written by social elites and give those who lack political power a raw deal. True justice, said Marx, requires a revolution against the social contracts of the past, to the ends of socializing control of production and redistributing material wealth. Later, Friedrich Nietzsche, the ultimate philosopher of the by-then dawning Modern Era, challenged even this materialist basis for justice, and argued that there is absolutely no such thing as objective morality or justice. "God is dead," Nietzsche wrote, "There is no truth, everything is permitted!"
In this country, such outright nihilism has never become dominant, but modern thinking has had a significant impact upon American social mores and conceptions of the good society. In his book, Modern Times, Paul Johnson suggests that the singular event which most unhinged modern Western philosophy from its historic belief in the existence of objective truth was the discovery early in this century of data confirming Einstein's theory of relativity. Western intellectuals had previously believed that the natural laws of Newtonian physics were scientifically proven and fixed. Then suddenly, the absolute certainty of Newtonian physics was shattered, and the result was a wide-spread crisis of faith among intellectuals as to the very existence of objective truth. Einstein himself did not share that crisis of faith. He acknowledged, to use Kantian terms, that no scientific model of reality is equal to reality -- "the thing in itself" -- but he also saw clearly that this does not mean that physical reality does not exist. It just means that we must change our models of reality, as necessary, to bring them into conformity with the results of our on-going empirical research. Unfortunately, this subtlety was lost on many intellectuals and soon Harvard Professor William James came out with a philosophy he called Pragmatism, based upon the idea that whatever works for you is true for you. The avatars of popular culture then began to confuse Einstein's scientific theory of relativity with some very non-scientific notions of relativism.
Needless to say, the idea that there is no objective truth has significant implications for how we live our moral lives. If there is no truth, then there is no right or wrong. There may be things which are legal and illegal as a function of the democratic process and the social contract, or as a function of revolution and the dictates of a socialist vanguard, but there is no such thing as an objective right or wrong.
The philosophic battle over the existence of objective truth continues. Most Americans still believe in truth and similarly believe that morality and justice are not, in the end, subjective. Indeed, most Americans still believe in God. We do not all conceive of God in the same way: some believe in the personal God of the Bible that characterizes Western religions like Judaism, Christianity and Islam; others believe in a more Eastern notion of a non-personal, universal spirit. But most Americans still believe in some sort of higher power, still believe that there is such a thing as objective truth, morality, and justice, and still want to hold ourselves, and our social and political institutions, accountable to these standards.
But there are many other Americans who have assumed the modernist perspective and no longer believe in objective truth, morality or justice. They reject the concept of natural law, and subscribe instead to a philosophy called legal positivism. In their opinion, it is inherently reactionary to tie ourselves down to fixed notions of right and wrong -- notions that, in their opinion, can become anachronistic. They believe that instead of revering certain moral precepts as sacred and unchangeable, we should allow ourselves to talk about, and democratically decide, what we want to make legal and illegal.
This is the topic that I want to discuss with you today -- the continuing battle between traditional American political philosophy and modern legal positivism -- because I believe that there are some traditional American ideas, including our core national beliefs in equality, human rights, and democracy, that are worth revering. I believe that human will is not the final arbiter of right and wrong, nor majority opinion the ultimate measure of a society's justness. I believe that there are such things as objective moral truths and I want us to begin again to teach these truths to our children.
The nihilism of our age was shown to me again a few months after this drug-related shooting when I was speaking with a famous American literary figure, who is a professor of poetry at an important university. We got into a debate over an assertion I made concerning some societies being morally superior to others. The professor considered my comment outrageous and a sure sign of grotesque ethnocentricity. Revealing the mindset of academia today, she rejected my judgementalism, declaring: "There is no such thing as one society being morally superior to another."
"Well," I replied, "does that mean that the struggle for civil rights in this country was in vain, and that an America which no longer legally discriminates on the basis of race is in no measure morally superior to an America which did discriminate by race? Does that mean that the Civil War was in vain, and that an America without slavery is in no measure morally superior to an America which justified slavery? Does that mean that Hitler's Germany was as morally acceptable a society as any other in the history of humankind, and that there was no reason to oppose it, because what the Nazis did to the Jews was just a case of different strokes for different folks?"
It took a while, but the professor ultimately recanted, conceding that some societies may be morally superior to others. That gave me hope because it demonstrated that even intellectuals can occasionally be swayed by reason. But it also caused me concern because the fact that the professor ever contested my original comment reveals how morally non-discriminating our intelligentsia has become.
It is a scary thing to see such Nietzschean nihilism both on our street corners and in academia, shared by the unlearned and the intellectual elite. But it is a true sign of our times, and it says something very important. We modern Americans, who worship at the altars of tolerance and diversity, may be uncomfortable talking judgementally about issues of personal morality or justice, but we must if we want to secure a better future for our children.
Why didn't that twenty-year-old drug dealer believe that his life had value? I believe it is because our society no longer teaches that life has value, or to the degree that it does, it does so ambivalently and confusedly. Our public schools teach self-esteem, but avoid the fundamentally religious questions of why an individual should esteem him or herself. We parents teach our children that life is precious, but then permit ourselves and our children to watch television shows where life is constantly depicted as cheap.
"How shall they believe if they have not heard, and how shall they hear if the word has not been preached?" the Bible asks. In my opinion, that twenty-year old drug dealer's life does have value, as do the lives of people everywhere, and it is time that we as a nation stand up for this idea and begin again to teach our children that they are precious, that all human lives are precious -- that life is, indeed, a gift from God! -- and that we should respect our life, and others' lives, and instead of throwing them away, work to make our lives good and our society just!
I was at the Museum of Modern Art when I saw someone wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Nietzsche on it, inscribed with the quotation: "There is no truth, everything is permitted!" I thought to myself: "I should just belt him in the back of the head. When he gets mad at me and asks why I did it, I'll answer, 'Hey, there is no truth, everything is permitted.'"
The biblical book of Romans declares that the law of God is written on men's hearts. Deep inside, we just feel that there is such a thing as right and wrong and that not everything is permitted. Call it revelation, call it instinct, call it whatever you will: we just sense that some things are wrong, the same way that the man at the museum would have sensed it the minute I hit him in the back of his head.
The challenge that we have today is to take this truth which we believe in our hearts and to once again base our culture upon it, to revive our traditional belief in the existence of truth, morality and justice and to once again extend the domain of such belief to our street corners and academies, so that Americans of all classes might endeavor, once again, to live morally and to work hard to establish justice.
American positivists will challenge the wisdom of our endeavoring to found human law upon arguably revealed or instinctual, but ultimately non-provable, notions of a higher or natural law. They will argue that a belief in a higher or natural law is a statement of faith, and that it is inappropriate to try and anchor a pluralistic society upon a precept that is so fundamentally religious.
I respond that it is NOT inappropriate to anchor a pluralistic society upon precepts that are fundamentally religious. Indeed, I would argue that all societies, at all times, have been -- and must be -- founded upon precepts that are fundamentally religious. The most fundamental values of a society can never be proven empirically, they are always statements of faith. That is what makes them values!
Faith is commitment to that which is believed, but cannot be proven. Value questions can never be proven, because they have nothing to do with physical reality, but with determinations of the human will. A fundamental fact of the human condition is that human beings are born with free will. God may have called the world good, but we still must decide for ourselves what we will call the world. All of the intimations of our hearts, all of the experiences of our senses, and all of the rationalizations of our minds will never be able to make us value the world if we choose not to do so. Only we can determine what we will value and what we will not. Hence, because value questions have to do with will, not fact, they can only be answered by faith, not empirical test.
This was the subject of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Instinct might tell you that you want to do this or that, but it is by faith that one exalts some instincts and represses others. Reason might tell you that instituting a penalty for murder is a good way to improve your chances of not being murdered. But it is by faith, once again, that you assign value to the preservation of your life and to the lives of others, and that you do not murder people even when no one else is looking or could possibly find out. Fundamental values are not the product of empirical research and reason, Kant demonstrated, they are statements of faith: commitments to that which is believed, but can never be proven.
With our mindset shaped by the cultural inheritance of our Judeo-Christian heritage, we Americans assert that it is a "self-evident" truth that all people are equally endowed with an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But for others of a different mindset, that assertion is not a "self-evident" truth, rather it is an obvious statement of faith: an obvious statement of our belief in, and commitment to, certain fundamental values which we declare to be axiomatic because, pertaining to the will, no empirical proof is possible. The Greeks and the Romans did not believe in our notion of an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; neither did any of the pagan civilizations which pre-dated the advent of Judaism. These pagans had their own fundamental values which they exalted by faith. Indeed, all individuals and all societies do. Even positivists and other moral relativists have values which they revere as sacred, although they hate to admit it.
The positivist will still protest. Perhaps it is true that all law is built upon essentially unprovable values, but should we revere such values and act as if they are sacred? Do we not risk tying ourselves down to the anachronistic beliefs and moral reasoning of long-gone generations if we do so?
To that question, I simply answer that tying ourselves down to certain core values is the very point. Our founders wanted to tie us down to the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Most Americans still want to tie themselves down to those principles. It is the modernists' nihilism which scares us to death!
Indeed, most of us are not embarrassed to believe in moral values like murder being wrong. We are not embarrassed to believe in precepts of justice like the rightness of equality, human rights, and democracy. We really do believe in the universality of these human rights, and the fact that values are not subject to scientific proof does not make most of us believe that these values are any less objectively true. Therefore, we are not embarrassed to revere these principles. We are not embarrassed to be committed to them. We are not embarrassed to be people of faith who believe not only in truth, but also, accordingly, in moral responsibility and justice.
After all, the mere fact that different civilizations have had different ways of looking at the world does not mean that all worldviews have equal correspondence with reality. The person who willfully closes his eyes to truth may choose to call it night while the sun is still shinning, but that does not mean that it is night. The murderer of millions may choose to call himself mankind's deliverer, but that does not mean that he should be followed. "God is not mocked," the Bible says. "That which you sow, you shall also reap." There is an objective consequence to every action. There is such a thing as objective reality. We must all determine for ourselves what we will choose to value, but that simple fact does not mean that all human choices will lead equally to human salvation. Those who by their free will choose to deny the existence of truth, morality and justice will reap nihilism, immorality and injustice. Those who by their free will choose to believe in truth, morality and justice -- and to dedicate their lives to the search for, and the service of, truth, morality and justice -- will reap a sense of meaning in their lives, a more moral personal life, and a more just world.
There are those who say that faith has never made a people more just or moral. But let's do a little thought experiment regarding personal morality. Imagine for a moment that it is 1 o'clock in the morning and you are walking down a deserted street in a very tough Jersey City neighborhood. There is no one around. Suddenly you see a group of young men walking up behind you. They draw nearer and nearer. There is no one else near, no one else to hear, no one else to see what will happen. Wouldn't you be relieved, as those young men begin to pass you, if you over-heard that they had just been to a Bible Study? Of course you would be!
Most of us believe in truth, morality, and justice, and we want others to believe in them also. We want people to believe in right and wrong, to respect their lives enough not to throw them away, and to respect others' lives enough not to do them harm. A positivist assertion that murder is illegal and punishable will not keep people from murdering one another when no one else is around. It is only reverence for the fact that murder is wrong that will make murder rare, even when no one is looking. Indeed, we want people to believe not only that they have an obligation to do good to others in their personal lives, but also that they have an obligation to work for the establishment of a more just society, because we know that such faith is absolutely essential to the potential for our society to move forward.
It was such faith which motivated the American Revolution. It was such faith which motivated the abolitionist movement. It was such faith which motivated the suffrage movement. It was such faith which motivated the civil rights movement.
No, we must not be embarrassed to be people of faith, because we must know that if we cannot re-establish faith in truth, moral responsibility, and justice, both on the street corner and in the academy, both among the unlearned and among the intellectual elite, then we will never be able to reach the Beloved Community that is our goal, no matter what else we do.
Okay, the positivist might respond, perhaps it is true that all societies are founded upon some set of essentially religious values, and perhaps it is not a bad thing for people to revere certain moral values so much that they are personally willing to sacrifice for them. But is it constitutional, here in the United States, for government itself to teach certain values in an essentially religious way? One can teach that freedom of religion is constitutionally guaranteed without teaching that it is a sacred gift. One can teach as a fact of history that our founders believed freedom of religion to be a gift from God, without having the machinery of the state dedicated to promoting this essentially religious notion today. So the question remains, is it constitutional here in the United States for the government to teach that freedom of religion is an inalienable right that comes from God?
My answer again is "yes." The founders did not mean for the First Amendment to prohibit government from encouraging faith in God. They meant to establish a separation of church and state, not a separation of faith in God and state. There is a significant difference between the two. The founders wanted people to be free to conceive of God however their consciences led them -- whether as the Holy Trinity, as the unitary god of the Hebrew scriptures, as a transcendent, non-personal principle of justice, or however else they may choose -- but they wanted all Americans to acknowledge the existence of a power greater than human will which has given humankind certain inalienable rights. The founders feared that if people did not acknowledge the existence of such a higher power and higher moral law, there would be nothing to prevent this nation from descending into nihilism, or from establishing a despotism of the majority. The legal positivists might like to believe that the Constitution's Bill of Rights can keep us free, but the founders knew that the Constitution is nothing but a piece of paper. It is the faith of the American people in the sacredness of the Bill of Rights' principles which has kept American majorities from amending away the liberty of American minorities. "Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure," Thomas Jefferson asked, "when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God?" His answer, shared by his fellow founders, was a resounding "no;" and that is why our founders, while constitutionally prohibiting the establishment of a state church, did not constitutionally prohibit the state's propagation of faith in the core principles of the Declaration of Independence. An individual citizen is free to accept these declaration principles as true, or to reject them. But from the day of our nation's founding to the present, it has always been constitutional for our government to propagate these core American beliefs, and our forebearers have made them the very foundation of our nationhood!
Indeed, ours is a confessional nation. What unites us as Americans is not race, church, national origin, or language. To be an American is not about being white or black, Christian or Jew, native or foreign born, or even about speaking English at home. It is about believing that all persons are created equal, that all are endowed by God with certain inalienable rights, and that the just government respects these rights, limits its actions accordingly, and within the bounds of such limits, acts only with the consent of the governed.
It has been our common subscription to these essentially religious statements of faith which has made us "one nation under God," and it is essential that we continue to teach these core beliefs to every new generation of Americans if we want America to remain one nation under God. Our forebearers knew this. That is why, in the past, they taught our children these beliefs in our public schools, and why they made evidence of understanding these beliefs a basic requirement for the naturalization of immigrants. That is why our American forebearers put "In God We Trust" on our money, and why the Supreme Court opens each day with prayer. That is why our forebearers put "one nation under God" in our Pledge of Allegiance, and why, still today here in Jersey City, we celebrate the cultural heritages of our many diverse people without discriminating against, or "whiting-out," the religious elements of their cultures.
When the ACLU sued us for not purging religious symbols from our city-sponsored cultural displays, I erected a sign in front of City Hall, quoting the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. . ." Yes, that is an essentially religious statement of faith. But it is what our founders believed. It is something that most Americans are still proud to believe. And it is indeed constitutional for our government to promote this core national belief, despite its fundamentally religious character.
How shall we proceed?
Abraham Maslow was a great psychologist who theorized about what leads to the good life, to human fulfillment, to "self-actualization," as Maslow called it. He suggested that if you want to know what leads to self-actualization, you should study self-actualized people. Study people who, in spite of difficult circumstances, seem to have found the secret to living a life of fulfillment and happiness, seem to have found the secret to achieving a spiritual peace that surpasses understanding.
Now, I suspect that if you look at Kurt Cobain, the lead singer of the rock band Nirvana who killed himself, you will not find that model of what leads to fulfillment. Cobain had money. He had fame. He had all the material blessings of this world. But he killed himself because he had no sense of the meaningfulness of life.
So instead, I personally look at Jesus Christ on the cross, with his hands out-stretched with nails going through them. Rather than being overcome by circumstance and destroyed, rather than being antagonized, angry, miserable, and outraged, he said "Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do." Even at that moment of excruciating physical pain, love flowed through him -- he loved his heavenly Father, and he loved his human neighbor -- and one witnessed in Him a power and a strength to love that cannot be taken away.
Like Maslow, I believe that if you want to know what leads to self-actualization, you should study self-actualized people. For me, Jesus Christ is my model, and what his life shows me is that the secret to the good life, the secret to happiness, the secret to human fulfillment (what prior generations of Americans called "salvation"), is love!
Martin Luther King, Jr. is a hero of mine. In a Birmingham jail, he received a letter from other Protestant pastors which said, "Martin, you are doing the wrong thing. You are turning the world upside down with turmoil. By asking for too much, too fast, you are making conditions worse for African-Americans."
What was Martin Luther King's response to that letter? Was it to close his mind to its suggestions? No. It was to take them to heart, to realize that those pastors had a perspective that was important to think about. He was willing to doubt himself, and to consider the letter's suggestions. But then, ultimately, Martin Luther King made a judgment that those pastors were wrong and that it was indeed time to fight for equal civil rights for every American. He took a position of faith and said that while the civil rights struggle might not be universally popular, it was necessary in order to convince American society about the injustice of Jim Crow segregation.
I don't know how many of you have heard recordings of Martin Luther King's last sermon. He spoke about his eventual death. He said that he didn't want it mentioned at his funeral that he had won the Nobel Prize. Rather, he just wanted it mentioned that Martin Luther King, Jr. had tried to help his neighbor.
He said "tried" to help his neighbor. He did not say "had" helped his neighbor, because he believed that ultimately it was for God to decide whether he had made the right choices about the proper courses to take. He was not so proud as to presume that he had a corner on truth. But he wanted it said that he had done his best to determine what was right, and that he had been willing to take action on the basis of that faith.
Notice too, by the way, that Martin Luther King did not just say that he "wanted" to help his neighbor. He believed that just wanting to do something is not enough, because as the biblical book of James states, faith without actions is dead.
Martin Luther King believed that we must be humble and listen to one another. He believed that we must be willing to doubt ourselves and to try hard to find out what is right and true. But he also believed that in the end we must act upon moral conviction, because it is only by virtue of that action, that commitment to what is believed, that response of faith, that we can move our community forward towards greater justice.
During that same last sermon, Martin Luther King also said that while he wanted people to remember that he had tried to help his neighbor, it didn't really matter to him anymore what people might think of him after he was gone, or even what people might do to him while he still lived, because he had "been to the mountaintop."
It says in the scripture, "We see through a dark glass dimly, but then we shall see face-to-face." I believe that Martin Luther King had a vision where he saw God's face, and what he saw was a God who loved him, who would always love him, who would always be with him, who would never let him down, who would never abandon him -- not even in death! -- a God whose hand Martin Luther King knew he could take, because that God had said to him: "I come not to judge you, Martin, but to give life, and to give it abundantly."
When it comes to questions of morality and justice, I believe that we must be humble, we must be tolerant, we must listen to one another and always be willing to refine our moral notions and our understandings of justice as increased experience and reason require. But in the end, after we have reasoned together and have done our best to see the truth, we must be willing to stand on moral conviction -- because action is what we must offer God if we are to move our society towards greater justice!
Our founders believed that the establishment of justice requires that government respect and protect the inalienable rights of every citizen to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. In that era, almost everyone farmed the land. Americans built their own homes, grew their own food, and made their own clothes. They were able to be largely self-reliant because there was an incredible amount of frontier land available. If land in Virginia was taken up, you could move to Kentucky or Illinois. Available land was the key essential of opportunity in that era. Accordingly, all you needed for opportunity to be universally realized was for the people to be able to farm freely the frontier and to take care of themselves.
We live in a different era today. I believe that in Jersey City, a child who is abandoned by its parents, or who may have no parents, needs more than freedom to have a decent shot at making it. For a child today to have true liberty, we must be willing to make today's essentials of opportunity freely available.
One of today's essentials of opportunity is the opportunity to get a great education. In this Information Age economy, economic opportunity is virtually synonymous with educational opportunity. I have been challenged on my school voucher proposal. In fact, the head of the New Jersey Education Association once scolded me on a news program for spending too much time on education. (I thought that was a little ironic.) "What business is it of a Mayor to be worried about education?" he asked. I tend to think it is very much a part of my business. In fact, I think that all of us here should make improving educational opportunity a part of our business. I believe that the way to improve educational opportunity for every child is, first, to fund education publicly, and then to give power over these funds to the parents or guardians of each child.
When I ran for Mayor in 1993, I went door to door in some of our housing projects and explained my school choice proposals. I would say to those I met: "We're spending about nine and a half thousand dollars per child per year for education. Don't you think that if you had that money to educate each of your children and could use it to send each of your children to the school of your choice -- public or private -- that you could guarantee a great education for each of your children?" Not one person responded: "I don't understand that concept." What people would say to me in various ways was: "Mayor, thank you, and thank God, that you are committed to making it so that we no longer have to beg politicians to reform education; rather you are committed to giving us the power over our children's education dollars, so that educators will have to improve their schools and then beg us to send them our children. You are committed to giving us the power to guarantee our children a decent education!"
Now, I believe that school choice opponents and I should reason together. I promise that I will continue listening to those who oppose school vouchers. But I will also demand that those who oppose school choice consider my arguments in favor of it, because I remain convinced that educational freedom is a human right, and that educational enfranchisement requires that every family in America -- not just the rich, but every family -- be afforded the wherewithal to shop for the very best education, public or private, available for each child. Indeed, I believe that there will come a day when we scratch our heads and wonder how anyone could ever have opposed school choice.
It is a vision of a community which is materially prosperous. It is a vision of community which is socially just. Most importantly of all, it is a vision -- see it in your own heart -- of a Beloved Community: where people are happy, not sad; where people are caring towards one another, not hateful; where people's hearts brim with love for life, and for one another, because they have committed themselves -- not because of circumstances but in spite of them -- to affirming life's goodness, to respecting their moral responsibilities, and to striving to expand justice.
We will never perfectly realize this vision. In this fallen world, we will never achieve perfect understanding of truth, never live perfect moral lives, never establish perfect justice. But I believe that God placed that vision of the Beloved Community in our hearts for a purpose: to challenge us to seek and reach for it.
Therefore, let us dream of that Beloved Community which is our goal, but let us also realize, as Harry Chapin wrote, that "Good dreams don't come cheap, you've got to pay for them. If you only dream when you're asleep, there is no way for dreams to survive, there is no way for dreams to come alive!"
Let us pray for God's guidance as we search for truth. Let us pray that we will be faithful to the moral and social responsibilities which the truth that is revealed to us dictates.
Join me now in bowing your heads.
"Dear God, please enlighten our minds. Please give us the faith to live in accordance with our moral convictions. Please give us the strength to love and fight for justice.
"And bless us, dear Lord, everyone!
"Amen."
