Today I'm thankful for the right to vote. I watched a documentary on Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and to watch how these women devoted their lives for the cause of suffrage, was inspiring. They faced some fierce opposition, and when they would speak in front of men, they would be ignored or booed, or otherwise harassed. It took a long time to get to where we are today, where every U.S. citizen has the right to vote, regardless of gender or property or any other category you can think of, except for perhaps age. You still have to be at least 18 years old to vote. I'm thankful for those women who fought hard for the freedom I have today.
I'm also thankful for the availability of Scripture. The other day I was in Books a Million, and I couldn't believe the number and editions of the Bible they have. In some countries, the Bible is illegal or otherwise not readily available, some people don't have  more than a single page of Scripture. I think we take for granted all we have in this country, in terms of religious freedom. And even what we have now is a relatively recent innovation, having just come around in the past couple hundred years. It used to be that if you weren't in church every Sunday, you got fined. If you read anything other than the state sponsored approved version of the Bible, you could be in big trouble. And that's why we have separation of church and state. It's not to prevent government officials from praying or putting up a Nativity set, it's to prevent the government from telling us what to believe and in what form to believe it. And I'm grateful for that.