Tear down this wall

By Tom Quiner

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjWDrTXMgF8]

Twenty-five years ago today was the speech everyone remembers.

Ronald Reagan stood at the Berlin Wall and uttered words so politically incorrect that he was reviled by the sophisticates on the Left.

Said Mr. Reagan:

“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

Watch the video above. Savor the moment once again.

This was a speech grounded in guts and gumption, not like the watered down Pablum that pours from the lips of the current occupant in the White House.

Guess what happened?

A few short years later, the wall came tumbling down.

Peggy Noonan explained the context of the speech:

“For a half century our country faced a terrible foe. Some feared conflagration. Many of us who did not were convinced it would not happen because the United States was not evil, and the Soviet Union was not crazy. The Soviets didn’t want war to achieve their ends, they wanted to achieve those ends without the expense and gamble of war. We rolled them back, bankrupted them, forced their collapse. And we did it in part through a change of policy in which Ronald Reagan declared: From here on in we tell the truth. He called the Soviet Union an evil empire because it was a) evil and b) an empire, and c) he judged a new and stark candor the way to begin progress. We’d already kissed Brezhnev; it didn’t work. And it wasn’t Reagan’s way in any case.”

Today’s occupant in the White House is more intent upon building walls than tearing them down. He wants to erect a wall around our churches and keep all worship inside. He wants to prevent us from following Christ’s injunction to go and serve the hungry and clothe the naked.

He wants us to isolate our faith from public works. He wants it so bad that he’s putting the power of the state behind his demands.

We don’t have Ronald Reagan around to help us fight the new wall Barack Obama is intent on building. But we do have the Catholic Bishops. And we have an army of lovers of liberty who won’t stand for it.

Bullies always want to build walls and box in those they perceive as weak.

Ronald Reagan wouldn’t stand for it.

The Catholic bishops won’t stand for it.

Will you?