As a Christian person I've never been more hopeful than now, in terms of the heart of the younger generations (millennial, Gen x, y, z) just now coming into their own. Part of the reason I'm hopeful is because the feelings, perspective of the young is formed within the science based Einsteinium Post-Modern world view that, in the end, places emphasis upon culture, nuanced context, the needs of community. Inclusion is everything. In this respect their world view aligns with the communal, human centric view shaping the Biblical narrative—healing, restorative.
Diverse-Union is the very center of a universe shaped by inter-connecting, yet divergent events (persons, experience) and is foundational to a desire to see just, more equal outcomes for those that start with much less. Diverse-Union’s origin is the Trinity of God; Three unique persons so United in Love as to be One in essential nature.
In the same breath let me say, as an American, I also have never been more worried about the lack of understanding among our younger Americans about the single greatest gift of the West, freedom. Freedom is chaotic, uncontrollable and accentuates the creative ‘individual’ over the ‘communal us’. Inherent in a democratic republic is this highly individualized valuing of each person, a unique Creation and worthy of trust. The source of this value, this reverencing of individual value in contrast to other communal interests like the state, empires, the village, corporations, media narratives is a tribal experience of vulnerable exiles—Israel; ever on the edge of slavery or extermination. Israel’s developed experience provides the Christian faith the radical idea of individual worth, informed by Grecian philosophy and later romanticism—taking political and legal shape via enlightened rationalism. It was finally codified in British common law.
American governance is a vivid expression of the West’s ideal that each person is of infinite value and governments prime purpose is to protect the indindividual. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
The essential need is for government to maximize open ‘free space’ where individuals and communities can empower themselves to achieve for themselves, their families and community the kind of social narrative they desire because they are living it, not simply longing for it from a distance. Now, a ‘free empowering space’ includes legal, structural access to capital, housing, health care and when in trouble legal help. But it is most dependent upon a spiritual truth; the good of each one must be paramount, even at the risk of the many.
Thus, there is an ideal to which we have yet to achieve that unites these two; communal diversity (safe spaces for diverse identity expression) and individual worth in conscience and empowerment via free, open spaces where freedom rules especially when it is not perceived as safe.
Inside the medical decision to terminate a pregnancy is a life and death decision about the human embryo fast becoming a fully developed child. Somehow both choices are inherently sacred and deserving protection. How does a human culture that honors choice, even bad ones, wrestle with that dual interest of the individual woman and the emerging individual child who at earlier stages than once imagined is viable outside the embryonic environ.
At this juncture we (left and right, red and blue) are pretty much in a civil war;
safety verses freedom,
communal inclusion verses individual achievement,
equitable outcomes verses more equal opportunities,
post-modern celebration of our differences verses modernity as rational, enlightened rules—making such diverse celebrations even possible.
In the early 1970’s America was politically wrestling with all these issues due to the pill, the sexual revolution and the emerging economic power of women in the work place, when the then Supreme Court pulled it from our federalist system of 50 differing jurisdictions—for all matters not rooted in the constitution itself. Suddenly federalized in Roe vs. Wade as by extended reasoning a right of privacy was declared.
“Doctrinal limbs too swiftly shaped, experience teaches, may prove unstable. The most prominent example in recent decades is Roe v. Wade,” was Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s perception of Roe. She was the attorney of record for a Navy Officer, then pregnant and who wanted to remain in the navy—which at that time required termination of pregnancy to retain employment. Her case, essentially pro-choice/pro-life was one of the competing cases moving toward a Supreme Court resolution; it’s arguments for choice rooted in the 14th amendment of equal protection (as is the same sex marriage decision) and not out of a right not explicitly given in the US bill of rights. The navy acquiesced to Ginsburg’s client making room for Roe to ascend.
Had her case instead been appealed there would not have been a right to abortion, but for equality of choice and the states adjusting their laws to accommodate. On such a socially and spiritually important issue Ginsburg believed a humbler approach would have allowed the nation to hammer out the issues not as pro-abortion verses anti-abortion but as pro-choice for the mother and pro-choice for the developing child.
The Supreme Court, in this session, has likely secured America’s near term future as a tolerant, potentially loving people united by our democratically managed diversity.
I know that to half of our people that sounds counter-intuitive, at best. The reason is as old as the nation, actually much older—in the garden where our first parents were allowed, natural consequences not-withstanding, to experiment and acquire the knowledge of good because they now knew the taste of evil. Choice, the Creator understood, was essential to human making. What the Supreme Court affirmed in Dobbs is that choice, in regard to even a medical procedure that terminates not just pregnancy, but a living human at various stages of development, must remain in the constitutionally protected arena where competing needs can and should be debated yet further.
(Allow me to state it differently and so loose the other half.)
By affirming that the Roe decision was rooted in a progressive ideal based on a desired and perceived “enlightened outcome” instead of a right specifically guaranteed in the constitution and by purposefully returning the issue to the political and democratic process, they have guaranteed that—over time—a compromise will ensue that attempts to balance a woman’s right to make the best medical decision available while recognizing the community’s interest in seeing that a human embryo quickly moving toward full human viability is also inside such private, yet highly communal decisions over what it is to be human, connected, diverse.
As a result of Dobbs, human sexuality will once again place pleasure and responsibility back into public vogue—for everyone: every woman, man, every mother, father, every familial, societal or religious community who value this mom and her child must now wrestle with what the creation of human life entails. At the very least we will be forced to acknowledge that raising children does indeed take a village and support women carrying in them a human child, yet pre-born. Such awareness includes the sometimes very difficult choices women uniquely face in terms of the physical, financial and psychological dimensions of pregnancy.
Roe was rooted in a right not given in the constitution and runs counter to everything a diverse and connected society values—the right to life. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was correct in initially believing that pregnancy and choice in a humane culture is about equality of choice, not a right to terminate a pregnancy up to and even beyond the moment when the developing human enters the world of air, of breath. Such an approach would have allowed a real and legal recognition of all stakeholders in the sanctity of life instead of the isolation of “privacy”. No longer can a man simply say “get rid if it” or a woman say “it’s my body, alone” except in those states where sex as play only is affirmed as absolute. Nor should the family, the village or the church or temple or mosque turn away without offering a woman multiple paths forward.
Imagine if the Supreme Court had simply found in the constitution the unborn child’s right to life—everywhere, in all states. Then, out of whole cloth a new right would have been born (pun intended) because of the desire for a certain outcome and the divide between left and right inflamed, this time, on the opposite side of the ledger.
In every decision this Supreme Court made in this term they declared a return to the purpose of the constitution as the skeletal tensions which hold us together. They turned away from being super-legislators and back toward the original purpose of the Constitution; to manage our democratic chaos in ways that bind us to fighting fair. For Example, the Court held that:
1) Religious practice in the public square is essential to freedom as guaranteed in the 1st Amendment, that affirms that “Congress shall make no law.. prohibiting the free exercise thereof” and;
2) Administrative agencies set up by congress cannot simply invent new authorities not inherently in the language of the law creating them, without congressional authorization, and;
3) The federal courts cannot interfere with the President’s authority to manage our national borders simply because the President’s policies are perceived by that court to result in negative outcomes, and;
4) A state may not by legislative process essentially privatize a constitutionally guaranteed “right of the people to keep and bear Arms” when it expressesly says this right “shall not be infringed.”
In each case the issue for the court rested not on outcomes (good or bad, left or right) but on process, placing the consequence of decisions where they belong for a free people—in their hands. The Bill of Rights, as amendments to the constitution, become those sacred human rights specifically enumerated that limit governmental power from encroaching upon each of us or our communities and states that make up our political identity.
The constitution functions as a baseball referee concerned only with managing the game, not determining who wins or looses. It’s purpose is to assure democracy by limiting every power (democratic, economic, social-political, spiritual) that might place one group over another. Hence:
1) Separation of executive, legislative and judicial powers. The President may not make up laws, only execute them. The Congress may not enforce laws, only make them. The judiciary may not make up laws or execute them, only apply them as written and being constitutionally relevant.
2) Enjoining a Bill of Rights upon which no federal and state jurisdiction may infringe.
3) Creating a Federal government of specific and limited powers with all other powers lying with the several states and to the people.
4). The election of:
a. A President based upon who gets the most votes in the most states, and;
b. A Senate elected to represent state interests (both small large having equal access), and:
c. A House directly elected by local jurisdictions of roughly equal voting strength.
These limits on democratic governance is what guarantees just that—equality of voice from large and small states, from urban and rural communities alike, for without them urban America would control everything, even in the smallest village in the land. Minority communities, which are often politically significant in a handful of states, retain a leverage greater than their numbers nationwide would allow precisely because of the electoral college.
Thus our fore-bearers created a system of layered jurisdictions and powers designed to protect the peoples freedom. If these constitutional tensions are ever removed we will come to know the tyranny of the majority or of corporations or of media narratives skewed toward one political party or a combination of these—enforced by democratic rule that no longer protects minority voices.
The framers of our system believed in the ideal world of equal access to freedom but were equally convinced that the road to hell was paved with good intentions. They absolutely understood that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Stated differently, if a party’s goals are lofty, worthy then so is the danger that they will impose their lofty ideals on everyone by force, if necessary. So they created a system of decentralized power as close to local rule as possible.
Constitutional governance is rooted in the supreme value of each individual, each community, each state, each interest group. The paradigm shift away from such limited government and toward a power-centric, shame based and manipulative control of the populace via super-majorities who feel and think 'correctly' and is sustained by government mandated, equality centered outcomes, sadly reflects the failure of our social institutions such as the Church, our educational systems, the Republican and Democratic parties and individual leaders to both model and create real and shared opportunities for wealth or achievement—social capital.
The left has captured the imagination of many young adults by accurately critiquing the worst in Western values (isolated individualism, consumerism, racial injustice, colonialism) without communicating in equal measure the genius of Western values (worth of each person, value of each geographic and community interest, keen awareness of the human tendency to acquire power and the incredible evil that inevitably emerges in any government when power is un-checked). Even so, the justice-centric ideas and principles of the left are in truth, people-centric. These ideals are Christo-centric as well. The question is can we retain or re-create communal institutions and governments that will be held to account in a self-critiquing and self-correcting governmental structures? That is exactly what our fore-bearers attempted.
The result of the failure to teach American civics 101 and just how corrupting power is (whatever our intention) is a naive trust in the power of humans to correct what is deeply wrong with us by creating new institutions or systems of relating that will inform and direct individuals to more equal outcomes.
America has known too many moments when egregious sin against minority rights was the norm. Even so the ability to address them has been the result of these foundational principles at play. Those who feel as though a right of privacy has been stripped away by the Supreme Court need to continue to communicate their concern and develope an electoral/judicial strategy to change either the constitution or national law.
The Supreme Court’s recent decisions will, if understood and increasingly accepted as a correct judicial doctrine actually guarantee the kind of legislative and executive actions that will result in evolutionary movement toward equal opportunity (for persons) and more equitable outcomes for communities. If on the other hand the electoral college is ended and the Senate functions as simply another house and the Supreme Court becomes 13 members, then 15, then 20—America’s social cohesion will continue to fragment, followed by either:
1) The tyranny of the majority combined with huge corporate interests or a;
2) Dis-union of these United States.
In such a scenario it will be those who are poorest, least connected who will suffer the most as the genius of social capitalism gives way to a new kind of fascism, where the government determines and runs every facet of our economic life. Only those who think and express the “approved thoughts” will be safe. Minority rights will be non-existent because the party in power will declare we are in a post “minority” world where such anachronistic language died together with the “supremists” who created such designations.
How can I predict such outcomes? Because freedom means the ability to hate is honored so that free women and men may choose reverence instead. In short; No freedom, no justice! No justice, no peace. No peace, no freedom.
Now, abide freedom, justice and peace. The essential without which justice and peace cannot function. Is freedom!
Blessings! Terry :)
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