According to the internet media,out the latest news and updates, President Barack Obama welcomed Chinese President Hu Jintao to the White House on Wednesday with full honors, a red carpet and a colour guard. But the two leaders wasted no time in delivering pointed messages to each other at the start of day-long meetings to address trade, security and human rights issues that have been the cause of past strain between the two powers.
In his remarks at the arrival ceremony, Mr. Obama said each country had an enormous stake in the other’s future, and he then referenced human rights.
“We also know this- history shows that societies are more harmonious, nations are more successful and the world is more just when the rights and responsibilities of all nations and all peoples are upheld -- including the universal rights of every human being,” Mr. Obama said.
For his part, Mr. Hu said the relationship between the two powers should be based on “mutual respect,” with each country recognising the other’s core interests and choices of development paths -- suggesting limits to how far the U.S. can push China on issues from currency to human rights.
The state visit marked Mr. Hu’s first visit to the U.S. since 2006, when his arrival ceremony was marred by protocol blunders including an outburst from a protester from the Falun Gong spiritual sect. No such missteps occurred on Wednesday. Read More: Obama stresses human rights, Hu calls for mutual respect
Historian Garry Wills, in his wonderful book on Lincoln at Gettysburg, rightly points out that for the first eighty-nine years of their history, citizens of the United States saw the Constitution, that document which forged the disparate and unruly original states into a single nation, as their birth certificate. Washington and the other Framers saw the Constitution as the document that completed the American Revolution, because liberty without mutual accountability is tyranny and chaos. It was Lincoln at Gettysburg who gave the Declaration of Independence the significance it retains to this day.
Though the Declaration lacks the force of law, its significance for our country and for the history of freedom around the world cannot be underestimated.
As a Christian who strives to pay heed to the Bible, I question the entire concept of "unalienable rights" on which the Declaration is predicated. But I do acknowledge that in the civil realm in which theists and secularists live and govern themselves together, it is a useful fiction, the content of which we can collectively decide. (Certainly, our notion of what constitutes a right and who--which has come to include the unpropertied, blacks, women in the intervening centuries--might stake a claim a right, has expanded over the years.)
For me though, it's personally more useful to think in terms of Jesus' "golden rule": Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I think more of my "unalienable responsibilities" to love my neighbor as I love myself, the second part of Jesus' great commandment, than I do of my rights. (The first part of Jesus' great commandment is to love God with all one's heart.)
Of course, not all voluntarily live by this ethic--even we Christians who, on earth, remain saints as well as sinners. That's why government remains what Martin Luther calls "an emergency measure," necessary until the return of Jesus and the final establishment of His kingdom. Government exists to coerce us into consideration of our neighbor when we fail to offer it voluntarily.
Winston Churchill once observed that democracy is the worst form of government...except for every other form of government. He's right, I think, which is why I feel so blessed to live in the cradle of modern democracy, the United States.
Take some time to listen to the hosts, reporters, and contributors of National Public Radio read again this year, the entire text of the Declaration of Independence, here. May God bless the United States of America and may the United States of America always bless God!
