We can’t pick and choose rights

“Assaults on core values of freedom cry out for response” (May 15), gives hope that there are still some in the media with red American blood flowing through their veins.

In the AP case, the government’s trampling Fourth Amendment rights in an effort to hinder 1st amendment rights is egregious, but par for the course. As any history student knows, during the Civil War the authorities destroyed presses and jailed editors. Tyrants’ suppression of the printed word is not new. Where such abuses are allowed to flourish, nothing is safe.

Your defense of the First Amendment (the freedom of the press part) is admirable; however your past record of agreeing with diminishments of others makes you inconsistent. Valuing one fundamental freedom while neglecting or disparaging another is myopic and ultimately hopeless.

“Core values” start with life: without it all others are meaningless. For the living and the yet-to-be-born, the God-given rights expressed and codified in the U.S. Constitution/Bill of Rights, are morally “inalienable”. The first 10 amendments necessarily have a symbiotic dependence on the others. None can remain if treated like a smorgasbord.

All good citizens, and responsible newspapers, are obliged to defend our American freedoms as a whole, not just the ones we like, or else they will fall like dominoes. Conceding one is abandoning the rest.

The Daily Herald’s usual wont to compromise on the 1st (the freedom of religion part), the Secnd, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth and Tenth Amendments is a failure to use the power of the press for preserving individual rights that we all hold dear. In the future, please use your influence to further ALL the freedoms that made our country free, prosperous, and blessed by God. Otherwise, the U.S. attorney general or some bureaucrat might be your new boss.

Glenn Garamoni

Ivanhoe