This weekend we celebrate Independence Day in the United States of America. It is not a religious holiday, but we have many reasons to thank God for what those colonists began in 1776. Abraham Lincoln described it four-score and thirty years later: "a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."  He spoke those words during the Civil War, which tested whether a nation "so conceived and so dedicated" could long endure. The nation has endured for more than a century since Lincoln spoke those words.

The words liberty and equality continue to challenge us. Living in a free country does not mean being able to do "anything I want." Such an attitude demeans the person who proclaims it and promises injustice and oppression to anyone who comes in contact with that person. Go out on the highway this weekend, and see what kind of environment that attitude creates. Reflect on the economic collapse or the environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, and find out what unbridled greed can cause.

We are only free when we do what we should do as human beings, members of a human family, when we respect ourselves and one another, when we acknowledge that there is a higher power in the universe than ourselves. We are truly free when we love God above all things and our neighbor as ourselves. This is the summary of God's law stated by our Savior, Jesus Christ. It is the foundation of all just law. It is the basis of a just society.

This kind of liberty brings about the kind of equality that really matters. The founders of the country did not pretend that everybody would have the same amount of money or the same talents. They did not include women or slaves or even non-property-owners in their grand scheme. The country had to evolve, so as to expand their concept of equality. Some of us now understand their words to mean that every human being has the same basic human dignity. Human life is to be respected from the beginning to the end of its existence. Only if God's law is obeyed does that kind of respect happen.

Obviously, more evolution is necessary on the part of many people before this ideal of equality is realized. The equality of unborn children is not yet assured by our laws. The nation is struggling to find better laws so that immigrants can be treated as equal human beings. Beyond laws, attitudes must change before discrimination and exploitation are rooted out of the public consciousness.

While we rejoice in liberty and equality that do exist, we realize that much more remains to be done. Our history proves that progress can continue, if we remain a nation under God. Our history also shows, that, if we throw God and God's law out, we open the way to tyranny of the strong and oppression of the weak. May the Lord keep us the world's best example of freedom and equality.