If Abraham Lincoln were alive today, he would surely deliver "The Springfield Address" that goes something like this:
Eleven score and seventeen years ago our fathers and mothers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a long fight, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can adhere to that spirit so articulated. In Illinois, we are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have the opportunity to change the law to honor the vision of those who gave their lives that that nation and its ideals might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men and women, living and dead, who struggled here in the days of yore and today, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought for liberty have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored souls we take increased devotion to that cause for which so many have given the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain and the living shall not have fought for naught -- that this state, the Land of Lincoln, shall have a new birth of freedom -- that we enshrine into law our founding precept of equality.
Illinois House: make our great state worthy of the name "Land of Lincoln."
Pass the Religious Freedom and Marriage Fairness Act today.