by Max Marbut
Staff Writer
Coxe poses question to Rotarians
Consider the constitutional rights Americans take for granted.
Consider rights such as freedom of speech and the press and the rights to legal counsel, a jury trial, protection from unreasonable search, to bear arms, to be protected from cruel and unusual punishment, freedom of religion and protection from self-incrimination.
Now consider having to choose just five of those rights while losing all the others. That was the exercise given Monday to members and guests at the Rotary Club of Jacksonville.
The facilitator was attorney and club past president Hank Coxe, who encouraged members to attend a naturalization ceremony. One by one, the candidates stand and renounce citizenship in their native country and become American citizens.
“It’s an amazing dynamic to watch,” said Coxe. “These people earned their citizenship. They studied and they had to take a test. Most people in this room had their citizenship handed to them.”
Coxe then asked the group to imagine that the United States had been taken over peaceably by an invader who decided Americans had too many rights and that the citizens should decide which five to keep.
Coxe distributed a questionnaire that listed 10 rights Americans often take for granted. He asked each person to select half to keep and the other half to give up. Each table had to reach a consensus on which rights to retain. After a few minutes of discussion, only a few tables had reached agreement.
“This exercise is to test what these rights mean,” said Coxe. “The Bill of Rights was designed to protect an individual citizen from a powerful government. These rights don’t exist to protect you from other people. They are there to prevent the majority from controlling the minority.”
He said every one of the rights is important and added, “once you give up a right, you never get it back.”
Coxe also is a past president of The Jacksonville Bar Association and Florida Bar Association. “It’s the courts to which people must be able to turn. The executive and legislative branches of government do not protect anyone’s rights,” he said.
“Whether you agree or disagree with the courts’ decisions, it’s the branch of government that protects us and our rights.”
In other business, the club announced it has surpassed $915,000 in donations to the Rotary Foundation for the Mercy Ships project. The campaign began in 2005 and has been supported by club members, the Jessie Ball duPont Fund and by matching grants from the Rotary International Foundation.
The donations have been used to improve the computer systems on Mercy Ships and to provide surgical services to patients in the Third World.
“I thank you from the bottom of my heart and so does Mercy Ships,” said club member Charlie Towers, who has served for more than 15 years on the Mercy Ships International Board of Directors.
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