Freedom

This appears in the September parish newsletter and was also posted at The Long Island Sentinel.


Nguyen Kim Tang was the informal head of the Topeka Vietnamese community in the late summer of 1975. He and his family were part of the South Vietnamese refugee exodus out of Saigon that year, following the defeat of South Vietnam by North Vietnam. I was chair of the resettlement committee at Our Savior’s Lutheran Church. Our Savior’s and a dozen other churches in Topeka sponsored maybe 400 Vietnamese altogether. It was a hoot watching grocery stores suddenly begin stocking 100 lb. sacks of long grain sticky rice for their new customers.

Mr. Nguyen, who had degree in English, ended up teaching English to the Vietnamese children in the school district. His job and the respect the Vietnamese paid to teachers made Teacher Tang an instant leader in the Vietnamese community, and I ended up being an informal advisor to as he offered what he called “Americanization lessons” to his fellow Vietnamese. I hesitate to think, at age 26, how thoroughly confusing some of my “advice” may have been to first-wave Vietnamese. And Mr. Nguyen ended up being my advisor. By that time we had an 11-year-old Vietnamese boy living with us, later adopted, one of the unaccompanied minors from Saigon. The kid didn’t speak English at all and, until he learned enough to understand me, any time I needed to chew him out or help with homework I hauled him over to Mr. Nguyen’s house for a fatherly translation. Mr. Nguyen and I really hit it off with each other.

I recall one conversation with him that, as the years have gone by, has made me keenly aware of the freedoms we experience in the United States, and all the more as I contemplate the controversy about building an Islamic community center and mosque in New York city near the 9/11 site.

The Vietnamese wanted to form a Vietnamese society. Mr. Nguyen asked me where he should go to register the organization. I was a little confused. Initially I thought he was asking how to incorporate a non-profit organization. I told him incorporation was a little complicated for a organization with no property and one that wanted only to meet now and again and offer cultural support and Vietnamese potlucks while adjusting to life in America.

But, he insisted, the group would print a newsletter and have officers, and they needed, he thought, a bank account. So, what office in the government should he visit so he could register?

And it struck me. He simply wasn’t accustomed to the kind of freedom we have in America, not even as a one-time citizen of the one-time Republic of South Vietnam. To his thinking, from his experience, he needed to register with an official, perhaps at city hall, or perhaps with the police. After some investigation a government official would issue a permit, duly signed and executed, so the Vietnamese in Topeka could legally hold their meetings, have their dinners, and conduct their cultural programs. But he wasn’t sure who would do that, police or civil authority.

When I told him this is America, you have a right hire a hall, hold a meeting, give a speech, print anything you like, and even say Buddhist prayers in public worship, he frankly looked at me like I had just told him the biggest whopper he had ever heard. I was chair of the Shawnee County Young Republicans then. I told him by example I doubted anybody, except maybe the Shawnee County Young Democrats, would be interested in anything we did. Official indifference, that’s what startled him. None of that had ever been his experience in Saigon.

That perhaps was the first moment in my life when I truly understood America is unlike any other nation in the world.

Great Britain for years was famous, or infamous, for Catholic disabling laws; from the get-go in America there was and is no “religious test” for public office. In Canada some forms of political speech – and increasingly, some forms of religious speech - are restricted; in America there is no prior restriction on speech at all. In France religious garb may end up being banned; in America the Amish and some Mennonites wear distinctive clothing and nobody thinks a thing about it. In some democracies voting is compulsory; in America Jehovah’s Witnesses may refuse to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in school. In Mexico, it is unlawful for clergy to wear clerical collars in public; in America (well, okay) Lutheran bishops probably should avoid miters, but that’s it.

The rights we have, Americans believe, are not grants by the government or any other authority. They are divine endowments, given by God to all men and so declared in our Declaration of Independence. And in America you don’t even have to believe there is a God who gives them; you are free to believe that human rights are simply inherent to human beings because those are the rights belonging to people because they are people, period.

Our history as a nation is in many instances a long struggle to make those rights manifest for everyone, but it is a struggle arising from our founding principles and our constitutional commitments. Prejudice against anyone is wrong, morally. Denial of any right – such as freedom of worship, tied by the First Amendment to the right of free speech – based on prejudice is wrong, morally.

Protesting a prayer mosque near the 9/11 site goes against everything I believe about American freedom. The 9/11 hijackers were no more Muslim (as I know Muslims) than Tim McVeigh was Christian (as I know Christians). There are tender feelings here, I understand, but they are misplaced. The mosque should be built, for the rights of everyone.