Marianne Williamson's Substack

Nothing is more core to American democracy than freedom. The freedom to do, to be, to say, to dream, to create, to work, to play, to speak privately, to speak publicly, to basically do anything we darn well please as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else. That is the richness and the glory of this country. People have fought, people have struggled, and people have died so that that ideal could be protected and its franchise expanded.

It is beyond comprehension to me that there are those who would now limit that freedom. Who’d unabashedly use the powers of the government not in a way to protect our freedom but to diminish it. Yet that is exactly what is happening, and it’s our generation’s task to protect that freedom from their assault, no differently than other generations have been called to do before us.

Perhaps someone should remind the modern GOP of these words spoken by Ronald Reagan:

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.

I’ve been a professional lecturer for over forty years, invited to speak at churches, universities, hospitals, Presidential libraries, and so forth. Never in a million years did I think that here the United States one of those places would have to get permission from the government before inviting me. Like, what is going on here? Except we know what is going on here. The Carter Center was told that from now on they will have to run all programming by the National Archives before scheduling. The Kennedy Center the same. And there is more. Apparently, Washington wants to run everything now.

Yet the Save Act is even scarier, though at a certain point this isn’t a matter of degree. This absurd proposed Congressional legislation, under the guise of protecting the integrity of our elections, would demand that a married woman who had changed her name would have to present proof of her citizenship at birth. An actual barrier to voting for the roughly 69 million married women in the United States who have changed their names? Absolutely not. But a damnable inconvenience and serious hurdle for many? Absolutely yes. And let’s make no mistake about it. This is part of a larger project undertaken by some people with very old-fashioned views about the rights of women, now empowered by the new administration. I’ll have more to say about that soon.

So here we are. We mustn’t allow ourselves to make excuses for any of this. It will become a slippery slope, if we acquiesce to any of it. Just like many people thought they’d never take away Roe v. Wade, well they did. Don’t kid yourself. These people are on the march.

They’re counting on us to get tired, to find the whole thing too mentally exhausting, to ultimately be okay with their encroachment on our freedoms. I don’t know about you, but no matter how tired I get, I’ll never be too tired to say “Hell No” to that. It’s our duty as Americans to honor and protect our freedom, even when others don’t.

We’ll hold the torch high until this chapter has passed. And I know in my heart that it will.