The United States of America is today’s representation of western civilization.  Our traditions and norms are properly and proudly treasured and celebrated.  Somehow, along the way, the concept of celebrating the goodness and righteousness of our own heritage has been maligned by some as being too boastful or too proud.  We need to affirmatively reject that criticism whenever and wherever it surfaces.  While we are a tolerant people, that is not to be confused with condoning that anything goes.  There is a growing school of thought that any limit on the concept of tolerance is somehow un-American.  I argue that on the contrary, any conflicting values that undermine and contradict with our traditions and societal norms are not only to be rejected, but must be aggressively and assuredly defeated, in the name of preserving our great culture and society.

Our standards of toleration are properly limited to comport with and foster our founding principles, our moral values and our adherence to our unique and traditional western culture, forged throughout our history and honed into the state of our society today.

Virtually every society and every civilization has as its founding, religiously based parameters that define the limits of behavior and the rules for our interactions with each other.  Based on the rule of law and constantly refined by experience and amendment, the United States system of governance has created a society, born of a divinely inspired Constitution.  The totality of this unique experience is the first ever example of self-governance, creating the reality of American Exceptionalism.

Not exceptional people, or exceptional land, or wealth or knowledge, but exceptional providence to be created at precisely the right time in history, proving that people are created equal and destiny is not properly determined by birthright.  That kings and tyrants have no place in a free society of the self-determined citizen, endowed by his Creator with rights not divisible by mere man.

If the United States of America is to remain that “shining city on the hill,” President Ronald Reagan so proudly boasted of, then we need to re-affirm our loyalty to our culture and firmly reject all efforts to undercut our founding philosophy, especially when it is attempted under the false banner of conflicting philosophy disguised as tolerance.

Assimilation should be the base requirement of participation in American society.  For the first few hundred years and for the tens of millions of anxious immigrants that originally formed this nation, their transformation to becoming an American was a condition so universally accepted that it needed no affirmation, it was a given, a condition of acceptance, a gift.  No one gave up their heritage, but they happily accepted their new role as Americans first.

The same spirit that transformed our grandparents into patriots ought to now be outwardly focused on discerning between those who want to assimilate as Americans and those who don’t, forming sensible immigration policy that welcomes the former and rejects the latter.