You’re listening to part two of an interview with Raleigh Adams, a first-place winner of the 2025 Human Rights Essay Contest, hosted by the Catholic University of America’s Center for Human Rights. The interview is conducted by Dr. William Saunders, Director of the Center for Human Rights. To listen to the rest of this interview, check the link in the description or go to humanrights.catholic.edu.
William Saunders: [The] second part of your paper is entitled “Policy Suggestions,” and you open that by saying, “At the center of our response must be an affirmation of human dignity.” Why don’t you expand on that just a little bit?
Raleigh Adams: Yeah, of course. So I do suggest in practice something like a stricter Foreign Agents Restriction Act, and these kind of more… transparency and oversight, these very concrete action plans. But as with anything, you can have too much of a good thing. So grounding these concrete actions in human dignity, as I mentioned earlier, that all cultures have this kernel of truth to them, they have this kind of virtue and dignity to them.
And recognizing even if you aren’t a person of faith, if you aren’t a Catholic or a broader Christian, just believers in liberal democracy should believe in these enlightenment ideas of the virtue of the human being and the value of the human being, and that should inform and be the moral backbone and guiding force to our policy decisions.
W: Yeah, and that… you know, again, anybody listening, that has to be the… Well, first of all,, I’m a human rights lawyer, for those who don’t know, so it is the fundamental assumption of the human rights movement that emerged after the Second World War, but it’s also, if you just think about it, any even vague concept of human rights has to be based on the dignity of human person, and you can’t…
That dignity is inherent. Otherwise, you don’t believe in it, because you’re saying some human beings don’t have it. So the dignity of the human person is essential, and you talk about civic education. I think that’s important. So part of the strategy for combating the CCP’s efforts, you’re saying – and you talk about the economic policy and the other things – but you say one is civic education, and again, why don’t you say a word about that?
R: Yeah, of course. So one of the concrete policy recommendations that I suggested was block grants, and they should be accessible to states to promote civic education centers and educational programming, and firmly as the beneficiary of multiple years of civic education and more broadly, a great books education, I think that that forms the student and the individual to appreciate the kind of moral dignity that we as people have.
And it then… The liberal education tradition might kind of seem a bit nebulous at first, but it really does kind of coalesce and crystallize in this ability to be applied to these human rights issues, and thankfully, these centers are on the rise. I’m a really big fan of the University of Florida’s Civic Education Center.
I think they’re doing fantastic work in this area, and for a personal plug, I was the beneficiary of Clemson’s Civic Education Center, the Lyceum program, which really prepared me well for kind of recognizing the moral backbone to these issues, and as mentioned, I cannot highlight enough how well I think they prepare young people and young leaders to kind of inherit these problems.
W: So like I said earlier in this podcast, I love the essay. There’s a lot of things I could take out of it to talk about. It’s just written in a very… way that makes… it’s pleasant to read it. So I’m just gonna jump ahead a little bit, and I’m gonna talk about the conclusion.
I was struck by the way you put this. The first sentence of the conclusion is that “confronting the CCP’s global reach is not merely a defensive task. It is a deeply constructive one.” I think that is a compelling way to put it. Why don’t you say a little bit about what you mean by that?
R: Yeah, of course. So I write in the conclusion that the issue of the CCP invites us to renew the moral and civic ecology that just sustains and expands our democracy and supports the dignity of each person, and it challenges us to reflect on who we are as a people and a society, and what we wish to build for future generations.
One of my favorite ideas and quotes in political theory is Burke’s quote about that tradition in society being this compact and this passing down from the past, present to the future, and I think that’s something that perhaps we as Americans and we as benefactors of liberal democracy, or at least contemporary democracy, have forgotten, is that we have a great inheritance upon us that we must protect and steward. I think stewardship really is the right word here, for future generations, and I think there’s something very beautiful and dutiful to that, and tying this back to your last question, I think this is something that civic education centers prepare us well for, is to recognize our inheritance and how exactly to protect that.
W: Yeah, let me read again. I want to read a sentence or two from the conclusion. “By embracing transparency, moral vigilance, and a steadfast commitment to human dignity, we affirm that national security is inseparable from the moral health of our policy. Our response must not be guided by fear alone, but by a love of truth and dedication to the common good.
In doing so, we resist the corrosion of our institutions and the reduction of persons to mere instruments of power or profit. We offer a witness to the world that freedom, rightly understood, is not empty license, but the possibility of living in accordance with truth.” I think that’s beautiful, and I think it speaks for itself.
I urge everybody listening to go read your essay. Is there anything else that you would like to say about your essay, or about what we’ve been talking about?
R: I think really just echoing this kind of idea of love over fear. Love of the American experiment and the liberal democratic tradition, but also love of one’s neighbor during very trying and very kind of precarious times. The idea of, as we mentioned earlier, the kind of Trojan horse and a kind of insidious threat of the Confucius Institutes.
It’s very easy to become very afraid and very locked down in the face of that threat. But that’s exactly how the CCP kind of governs: through fear, conformity, and control. And instead, a free society must respond through trust, moral courage, and transparency, and I think that’s where the American response comes in as a constructive act of love for truth in the human person.
And I think that echoes Veritatis Splendor very well. I think this is where the encyclicals really shine through, is that we should be governed by love for our neighbor, and love, be that our American neighbor, our international neighbor, and that informs how we, we go forward in truth.
W: Yeah, again, I just want to mention to anybody listening, I agree 100% with what you said, and the teaching of John Paul II who is, again, for non-Catholics, the Pope, who I’m sure you’ve all heard of, who was Pope during the confrontation with the Soviet Empire that led to, actually, the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
He wrote many of these encyclicals, and his teaching is a central part of the program, of my master’s program. So anybody that’s interested in this and you haven’t read John Paul II, go read John Paul II because there is a lot there, as Raleigh is saying, that informs her approach here.
I think, you know, again, like you’ve said, Americans should, should be very grateful for the society they live in, the kind of structures and opportunities they have. And I say this not really myself, but as reflecting what Chen Guangcheng says, because he came to America not only to flee tyranny, but to come to an open, democratic society.
And as he tells me, the Chinese people in China look to America as a great beacon of hope and of democracy and human rights and the rule of law. So, I think part of our mission is to respond to the threat, as you say in your paper, respond to the threat of the CCP without losing the wonderful things that bring people like Guangcheng here to the United States.
R: I agree entirely. It’s… This is, once again, a shameless plug for the Roepke program, but I think one of the greatest gifts that they gave us was this kind of understanding of love of not only the Catholic tradition, but of the American tradition as well, that we have something to give the world and we can’t lose that in the face of these social, political, and economic threats.
W: Yeah, and as… Again, that’s so good about this paper, you caution, as we really said this earlier, but I just end by making sure people are aware of this, is: we don’t… we’re not descending into xenophobia or anything like that. We are pro-Chinese people, but not pro-CCP because the CCP, as Guangcheng has said, is the enemy of the human race.
I mean, it seeks to deprive us of our God-given natural human rights. So, with that caution in mind, we have to be vigilant and protect ourselves. So, Raleigh, thanks again. I hope everybody will read your essay, and I hope everybody will come back for the next episode of The Barefoot Lawyer podcast, and visit us at our website, humanrights.catholic.edu, where you’ll be able to read Raleigh’s essay and the other winners in our human rights essay contest, which, again, I say we’ll have again in the spring and early summer, is for students at every level and I hope you will participate.
Thank you.
R: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.
The Catholic University of America’s Center for Human Rights has published a documentary on the United Nations’ Universal Declaration on Human Rights. The documentary features world-class human rights experts from former state department officials to ambassadors and human rights activists. It can be found on our website at humanrights.catholic.edu.
Read Raleigh’s award-winning essay here: https://humanrights.catholic.edu/renewing-the-moral-ecology-of-freedom/