FREEDOM IN AMERICA: THE DYNAMIC EXPERIMENT CELEBRATES 218 YEARS

Monday marks the 218th birthday of our nation, and we're still trying to get it right. Such is the nature of the United States, a country grounded in freedoms but still polishing the fine points. America's Constitution provides the fundamental principles through which the people of this nation can live freely, but the process of refinement, of deciding the gray areas of the law and our liberty, continues. As Independence Day is celebrated, we also celebrate this process and the dynamic countenance it provides America and its people.

Our nation's freedoms, declared in 1776 and formalized in a document adopted 11 years later (and revised in the 207 years since), endure because Americans seem constantly to examine them. The world changes, yet, as the Founding Fathers sensed when constructing our government, certain tenets must remain steadfast. The constitutionally endorsed freedoms of religion, speech, press, peaceable assembly, petition and trial by jury, among others, are well known and frequently debated. More clouded but certainly important to some Americans are concepts such as academic freedom, reproductive freedom, economic freedom ... supposed liberties that certain groups would say buoy our lives and the evolution of our society.

Complete freedom, obviously, was not what the constitutional framers had in mind. Ours is a government meant to sustain ordered liberty, allowing people to live together in a collective way. For each person, freedom must be balanced by self-restraint and respect for sound authority. When legal challenges are mounted, they usually stem from one entity's desire to curtail the freedom of others. These breaches of freedom's right-of-way come in all forms and we find examples in the headlines constantly: In an offbeat example from last week, members of the musical group Pearl Jam complained to a congressional committee that ticket distributors infringed on their right to keep prices for their concerts low. Clearly, those who wrote the U.S. Constitution did not envision grunge rock or the garish economics of the music industry, but the system they established accommodates such disputes, grows because of them.

Our democracy does not function unless people are free to express their opinions. How else can a majority view come to light? Yet the freedom of speech issues that arise take in modes of communication that were unheard of in 1776 ... or even several decades ago. In its just-ended session, the U.S. Supreme Court left unresolved whether Congress must require cable television systems to use up to one-third of their channels to carry local broadcast stations; the cable industry contended such a congressional rule infringes on a company's freedom of speech. The link between free speech and a cable signal may be tenuous to some, but the system embraces just such claims.

One of the Founding Fathers, John Adams, said of Independence Day, "It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty." His reference to the divine purpose seen in the creation of our freedoms stands alive with irony in some modern disputes. What would Mr. Adams say of proposed guidelines of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that imply references to religion in the workplace can constitute a form of employee harassment?

In this case and the others mentioned, though, the American system functions to sort out these conflicts, to weigh the interests of individuals and of society, and to protect the life, property and dignity of all Americans. The process is not always glamorous (and at times is simply tedious), but the form of government protected is dynamic because of it. Freedoms we celebrate on Independence Day are not easily arrived at, and our appreciation for this should be considerable.