Excerpt from Marianne Williamson's Lecture "4th of July, A Mindful Celebration"

Recorded live in Los Angeles on Independence Day 2011, Marianne Williamson talks about the ideals set forth by our Founding Fathers, Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham Lincoln, and other of our country's visionaries, and how these ideals apply to our world today.  Following is a transcribed excerpt from this fascinating lecture.

I’d like to begin by reading a quote to you, and I wonder if anybody is going to guess who wrote these words.
 
“We are witnessing in our day the birth of a new age with a new structure of freedom and justice. Now as we face the fact of this new emerging world, we must face the responsibilities that come along with it. A new age brings with it new challenges. First, we are challenged to rise above the narrow confines of our individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.

The new world is a world of geographical togetherness. This means that no individual or nation can live alone. We must all learn to live together or we will be forced to die together. Through our scientific genius we have made of the world a neighborhood now through our moral and spiritual genius; we must make of it a brotherhood. We are all involved in this single process. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. We are all links in the great chain of humanity. We have before us the glorious opportunity to inject a new dimension of love into the veins of our civilization.”
 
There are a couple of lines I just read that are among his most famous. Guess who wrote that? Martin Luther King, Jr. I think that those words are so beautiful. Now, when our country was founded, the very notion of a nation in which all men are created equal, the very notion of these principles, the principles on which we stand -- number one, that all men are created equal before God and should be treated that way with the equality of rights and opportunities given to us by God, and that is how the American government should treat everyone.
 
So that, you know, once again it is up with this issue of gay marriage. That is a first principle. On this day, John Adams, our second president, asked that we revisit the first principles. Number two, E Pluribus Unum. E Pluribus Unum is also as significant an issue today as ever. It is the idea that we would be a diverse group. There would be many religions. There would be many ethnicities. There would be a great diversity of expression. There would be the many out of many one -- E Pluribus Unum. That some would be gays – well, they weren’t saying that some would be gay; they weren’t even dealing with that. You know what they did, the founders: Part of the fascinating issue of the first documents of the United States, which is both the Declaration of Independence, The Constitution, and the Gettysburg address of Abraham Lincoln, is considered one of the first documents because of the principle of the people, by the people, for the people.

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