Fifth grade is the year for American history, when the Constitution is broken into three branches of government, the Bill of Rights is memorized, and famous patriots stir our imagination. American children grow up, nurtured on the ideals of independence and freedom.

Patrick Henry lives on today at Colonial Williamsburg, America's largest living history museum. In body and voice, Richard Shumann recreates Henry and the words he used to stir colonists to battle.

In March 1775, Patrick Henry urged his fellow Virginians to arm in self-defense, closing his appeal (uttered at St. John's Church in Richmond, where the legislature was meeting) with the immortal words: Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains or slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take but as for me; give me liberty or give me death! ...

But there is another Henry. And another quote. This Henry speaks of liberty, too. But more to the point, he speaks about the purest essence of liberty, the distillation of what our freedom must be in order to allow us to be free.

Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty. --Henry M. Robert...

Henry M. Robert died in 1923 in New York, leaving us an important lesson about liberty. Unfettered and unrestrained, liberty is a freedom that will enslave us. Order, rules, and governance are the friends of freedom that protect us from ourselves....

As we work to teach our children the value of saving sex until marriage, we must look ourselves full face in the mirror. We must admit that our culture has used our love affair with liberty to enslave us to our passions.