liberty and freedom
they're not the same. dictionaries tell us they are, but lexicographers got it wrong this time. Patrick Henry said, "Give me liberty or give me death." It's not as stirring if you switch in freedom. try it. Martin Luther King Jr. rallied for freedom, and switching in liberty confuses us. on the other hand, if lexicographers got it wrong, then we're on our own to figure out the difference. (that's not quite true, a practitioner of constitutional law probably knows the difference so well that he or she thinks it's obvious.) the Bill of Rights might be a place to turn, and maybe it suffices. the government grants us freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, and it guarantees our liberties. it grants us our rights, but our liberties somehow come from Nature. cases brought to the Supreme Court over the last seventy years have often redefined our freedoms or our rights, seldom our liberties. but we tell soldiers they go off to fight for our liberties and our freedom. in this case, our freedom is not something defined by the Bill of Rights. for white folks, we fought the Revolutionary War to determine our freedom. for black folks, we fought the Civil War. but white folks are too devious, and the Civil War did not suffice. for people of color, we had to fight for freedom in the fifties and sixties all over. for people who are LGBTQ, we recently had to fight for freedom. for women, we've been fighting for freedom since the sixties. don't think it's over. the Republicans have vowed to ungrant all those freedoms, and they have just the president-elect and the Congress-elect that they might do it. bone up on your liberties and freedoms. I predict you're gonna have to fight for them all over. it helps to know what you're fighting for. best wishes.
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