Speaking of “our personal pledge to duty, honor, country,” President Thomas S. Monson told some 19,000 people at a patriotic service here June 28 that those words were “our watchwords, whether in war or peace.”….Quoting Gen. Robert E. Lee of Civil War fame, President Monson said, ” ‘Duty is the sublimest word in our language. Do your duty in all things. You cannot do more; you should never wish to do less.’” He also quoted Harry Emerson Fosdick, a renowned Protestant minister and speaker, saying, “‘ Duty is never worthily performed until it is done by one who would gladly do more if he could.’”

Speaking of honor, President Monson explained, “Honor is akin to duty. It is an expression of our inner selves, a commitment to do that which is right. We remember the adage: ‘You can’t be right by doing wrong, and you can’t be wrong by doing right.’”

As he began his address, President Monson spoke of his love for the flag. He recalled returning from a recent assignment in England, Holland and Denmark and seeing beautiful flags at each house in his neighborhood in commemoration of Flag Day. “Gazing at the sight of Old Glory,” President Monson said, “took me back many years to those boyhood days of long ago.”

He then reminisced about boyhood experiences of being a member of the Junior Red Cross and of the Drum and Bugle Corps of his elementary school. While he could not play the bugle, he said he simply “loved marching and hearing the sound of those who could play while carrying the precious flag to the proper spot and lifting it to the top of the flagpole in reverent silence.”

While he was in junior high school, Pearl Harbor day changed his world and that of Americans everywhere, said President Monson. Toward the end of World War II, he served in the U.S. Navy and said he often waited “for the clear sound of the bugle playing Reveille as morning dawned, and the mournful sound of Taps in the evening indicating lights out. I confess that at such moments I felt a lump in my throat and the beginning of tears in my eyes.”

We should love the stars and stripes, and accept the constitution of these United States as divine. Don’t hesitate to stand on the right side.

I appreciate the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights that grant unto each man individual liberty… I have nothing but contempt in my heart for men who would disgrace that flag or would mar the standards of freedom and individual liberty.

It is the duty of every man and every woman who is worthy of the name, Latter-day Saint, to give such information to the officers of the land as will enable them to enforce the law and put aside the wickedness that has developed so rapidly since the great World War [WWI]. We not only believe in honoring the law, we not only believe in obeying the law, but we believe in sustaining the law, and that can only [be] obtain[ed] by individual service. . . . This is our country, our heavenly Father gave it to us, and he expects each of us to show our appreciation of our birthright by helping in every possible way to purify society, and to develop those traits of character, and those virtues, that will enrich the community and prepare an environment for those who are now growing up and those who are yet unborn. . . .

. . . I do beg of you, my brethren and sisters, that you will appreciate, and sense fully the wonderful gifts of our heavenly Father, your mountain homes, your valley homes, your plain homes, your heritage, and the grand flag that represents the liberty of the greatest Nation upon the earth, and represents the combined wisdom of the very men whom our Father says he raised up to give to us the Constitution of this favored land. When we see that starry flag, men should uncover their heads in reverence, and our sisters should evidence their appreciation of it. Wherever we go, let us keep in our hearts this thought: this is the land of Zion, dedicated for the blessing and the uplift of mankind.

We will rally around the flag of our country and maintain the glorious Constitution for weal or woe.

If other people can afford to trample under foot the sacred institutions of this country, we cannot. And if other people trample upon the Constitution and pull it to pieces, we will gather together the pieces and rally around the old flag, or what is left of it, and proclaim liberty to the world, as Joseph Smith said we would. Is that treason? I do not know; no matter, it is true. Are we going to hurt anybody? No.

But all honorable men, all men who do right and maintain the laws and the Constitution of the United States, we are their friends and will sustain them to the last. . . .

We see many signs of weakness which we lament, and we would to God that our rulers would be men of righteousness, and that those who aspire to position would be guided by honorable feelings—to maintain inviolate the Constitution and operate in the interest, happiness, well-being, and protection of the whole community. But we see signs of weakness and vacillation. We see a policy being introduced to listen to the clamor of mobs and of unprincipled men who know not of what they speak, nor whereof they affirm, and when men begin to tear away with impunity one plank after another from our Constitution by and by we shall find that we are struggling with the wreck and ruin of the system which the forefathers of this nation sought to establish in the interests of humanity. But it is for us still to sustain these glorious principles of liberty bequeathed by the founders of this nation, still to rally round the flag of the Union, still to maintain all correct principles, granting the utmost extent of liberty to all people of all grades and of all nations.

According to the Constitution of our Government, we have rights in common with our fellow-countrymen. We have a right to settle in any unoccupied and unclaimed part of the public domain owned by our Government, where the machinery of the Government has not extended, and there govern and control ourselves according to republican principles; and the Congress of the United States is not authorized in the least, by the Constitution that governs it, to make laws for the new settlement, and appoint adjudicators and administrators of the law for it. . . . In “Amendments to the Constitution of the United States,” articles nine and ten, it is definitely stated that “The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” . . . “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” . . .

We will cling to the Constitution of our country, and to the Government that reveres that sacred charter of freemen’s rights; and, if necessary, pour out our best blood for the defence of every good and righteous principle.

. . . The spirit and letter of our Constitution and laws will always give us our rights. . . .

If we do not do this [form a state government], we are living beneath those rights set forth in the Declaration of Independence, and the privileges granted to us in the Constitution of the United States which our fathers bought so dearly for us. Let us unfurl the stars and stripes—the flag of our country; let us sustain the Constitution that our fathers have bequeathed to us in letters of blood; and those who violate it will have to meet the crushing and damning penalties that will bury them in the mire of everlasting disgrace. If we sustain it, it will be sustained; otherwise it will not.

When the day comes in which the Kingdom of God will bear rule, the flag of the United States will proudly flutter unsullied on the flag staff of liberty and equal rights, without a spot to sully its fair surface; the glorious flag our fathers have bequeathed to us will then be unfurled to the breeze by those who have power to hoist it aloft and defend its sanctity.