Hello Friends,
Sunshine, hotdogs, softball, picnics, parades and fireworks. The celebration of our national birthday is a time honored tradition. It is a time where we gather with family and friends to kick up our heels and take a day off.
What a long road our nation has traveled from the first Independence Day, the Day brave men said enough to the unrepresentative, autocratic rule by the monarch of Great Britain. I imagine there were no picnics, no hotdogs and no parades. The only fireworks these men would see would be in battle, as many they knew and loved would lose their lives to the agony of war.
Unlike other nations that have evolved over time due to geography, like-ethnicity or clans banding together, America that day was born. It was born from an idea that because we were people made in the image of God we had unalienable rights that governments were to protect, not usurp. For the previous 150 years the American colonies had been like a growing fetus, where generation after generation learned the value of self-rule without the need of a tyrannical monarch. It was America’s Judeo-Christian value system at the heart of this newly born country. A diverse people bound together by moral obligations. A new nation bound together by an understanding that freedom comes with a heavy price and it only works when its people are mostly self-reliant, responsible for themselves.
Fast forward 241 years to today. Ask those at your picnic or sitting next to you waiting for fireworks whether we are better off than those who risked their lives and sacred fortunes? Is America 2017 better than America 1776? Materially and technologically no doubt. But morally? Without a virtuous people, a representative republic cannot stand. It collapses from the burdensome weight of governmental regulation for every activity, because individuals can no longer regulate themselves. American liberty has always had a moral obligation. Remove the moral restraints and chaos follows. And that is where we are headed, to a state where in order to maintain control, everything you do will be codified in one form or another. The state, not God, will become the new arbiter of all.
Enjoy your liberty today. Enjoy the freedoms we have been given. Remember, it’s not the 4th, it’s Independence Day.
Your Liberty First,
 Capitol Phone: 503-986-1456
Capitol Address: 900 Court St. NE, H-377, Salem, Oregon 97301
Email: Rep.EWernerReschke@oregonlegislature.gov
Website: http://www.oregonlegislature.gov/reschke
FaceBook: https://www.facebook.com/wernerfororegon/
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