This is an immigrant nation. All are welcome here, or should be regardless of how they came or where from. To new citizens this is their county now though the old country is indeed their homeland. With this comes responsibilities as well as rights. There are things to be left behind if ours is to be their country too. I do not like to hear that something of which our countrymen disapprove is justified by being “our culture.” I do not want to hear of anyone thinking that lawbreaking can be handled within their community without cooperating with the police and courts. That is not the American way which is based on three principles: Judeo-Christian ethics, French enlightenment values of human equality and individual rights, and English law.

There were once three pillars of American society. What is missing today is the social and cultural pressure which once framed small communities and limited the excesses of individual “rights,” and the religious pressure to adhere to an agreed moral code. The only remaining pillar is their weak sister, law. When I was young, students in America were not taught that ours is a multicultural society. We proudly called it a Christian country. I am a social liberal yet I find that those who define our educational standards have betrayed the soul of the county in search of some multicultural identity (or rather lack of identity.) One needn’t be a Christian to adhere to Christian values. It is part of the America that they presumably seek. If someone doesn’t want to agree to our values why is he here? Just to get money? But to anyone who wants to join on: welcome aboard. It is not necessary to turn your back on your motherland nor its culture except when the old ways undermine the values of the new country to which you are pledging allegiance. But then one should stand up to be counted. It distressed me that after 9/11 there was no call from Arab-Americans to form an Arab legion to defend their new nation. Instead there were only loud charges of bigotry against them. In fact our government could not even enlist many as translators because there was more profit in the private sector. There have been charges of Hasidic Jews refusing to cooperate with police and the general society lest their wrongdoers stigmatize the whole group and encourage antisemitism. The Catholic hierarchy, always fearful of being dominated by nation states, have opted to discipline priests themselves and failed at it. Whatever justification there may have been in the Middle East or Central America or Sicily to prefer tribal or religious or criminal authority to the rule of government, it is not acceptable in America whose police, whatever their sometimes racist attitude, do generally believe in true public safety, freedom of thought and action, and final justice. There is no reason to lose America’s core values in search of some multicultural utopia to be forced upon all by an elite educational establishment at the cost of an ethic which, whatever faults it has had, has usually been in advance of contemporary societies elsewhere.

Too many things that the right or left think proper have been identified as individual rights in educational doctrine and the media, but these sometimes conflict with the rights of the general society. Definition is needed. Too often individual freedom is a cover term for unrestrained freedom to market. Yet America avoided left wing radicalism by restraining the robber baron capitalism of the nineteenth century for the common good in the twentieth.