Independence Means the Right to Live in Community

Every Fourth of July, Americans return to the words that gave the nation its moral vocabulary: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Declaration of Independence was not simply an announcement that the colonies would separate from Britain. It was a claim about human dignity, self-government, and the purpose of public power. Government, the Declaration insists, exists to secure rights—not to confine people, exclude them, or decide that some lives are better lived out of sight.

That promise has always been unfinished.

Abraham Lincoln understood that unfinished work. In his Second Inaugural Address, delivered as the Civil War neared its end, Lincoln did not invite the country into easy celebration. He called the nation to humility, repair, and responsibility: to “finish the work we are in,” to “bind up the nation’s wounds,” and to seek “a just and lasting peace.” That is the American tradition at its best—not a tradition of declaring freedom once, but of widening it, defending it, and making it real.

That is why the Supreme Court’s decision in Olmstead v. L.C. remains so important.

In 1999, the Court recognized that unjustified segregation of people with disabilities can be discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act. The principle at the heart of Olmstead is simple and profound: people with disabilities should not be forced to live in institutions when they can live in the community with appropriate supports.

This is not a technical legal idea. It is an American idea.

For people with disabilities, independence does not always mean doing everything alone. It means having the supports necessary to make choices, live at home, work, study, worship, vote, build relationships, and participate in the ordinary life of a neighborhood. It means not being separated from family, friends, and community simply because public systems are easier to administer through institutions. It means being treated not as a problem to be managed, but as a person with a rightful place in civic life.

That is where Home and Community-Based Services become essential.

HCBS is the practical infrastructure of disability freedom. A personal care attendant can be liberty. A wheelchair ramp can be liberty. Transportation to work can be liberty. Supported housing can be liberty. Help with bathing, eating, dressing, medication, communication, or daily routines can be the difference between isolation and participation.

Too often, public debate treats these services as optional benefits or budget line items. But for millions of people with disabilities, HCBS is what makes constitutional and civic ideals livable. Without support, “independence” becomes an empty word. With support, people can remain in their homes, contribute to their communities, and exercise the ordinary freedoms other Americans take for granted.

The question is not whether people with disabilities are “dependent” or “independent.” That is the wrong frame. All freedom depends on public commitments. Roads, schools, courts, emergency services, voting systems, civil-rights laws, and public health programs all help make individual liberty possible. HCBS belongs in that same tradition. It is a public commitment that says people with disabilities are not visitors to American community life. They are members of it.

That commitment is especially urgent now. A recent Department of Justice legal memo seeks to narrow the meaning of Olmstead and cast doubt on the integration mandate that has helped protect people with disabilities from unnecessary institutionalization. But Olmstead remains more than a precedent. It remains a promise: that disability does not erase a person’s right to community, choice, and belonging.

Weakening Olmstead would not simply change disability policy. It would narrow the meaning of liberty itself. It would suggest that community life is optional for some people, that segregation can be treated as administrative convenience, and that the freedom to live among one’s neighbors depends on how much support a person needs.

That is not the tradition we should celebrate on Independence Day.

The American story is full of contradictions. The Declaration proclaimed equality while slavery endured. Lincoln’s generation confronted that contradiction at terrible cost. Later generations challenged segregation, disenfranchisement, exclusion, and discrimination in other forms. Disability rights is part of that same unfinished work.

Olmstead says people with disabilities belong in the community. HCBS helps make that belonging real. Together, they carry forward the Declaration’s insistence that government exists to secure liberty and Lincoln’s call to build a more just peace.

A country cannot celebrate independence while accepting unnecessary confinement for people who could live freely with support. A nation committed to liberty cannot define freedom only for those who need no assistance. A government of the people cannot exclude disabled people from the places where the people live.

This Independence Day, defending Olmstead and strengthening Home and Community-Based Services should be understood as a patriotic obligation.

Independence means more than separation from a king. It means the right to shape one’s own life. It means the chance to live in relationship with others. It means being recognized as a neighbor, worker, student, voter, family member, and citizen.

To protect HCBS is to protect independence. To defend Olmstead is to defend the American promise. And to insist that people with disabilities belong in the community is to continue the best tradition of the Fourth of July: declaring, again and again, that liberty must belong to everyone.