Amazingly, Graced

I don’t usually write much about issues outside the borders of the city of Trenton. Sometimes, I touch upon matters encompassing greater Mercer County, and even more rarely the entirety of the State of New Jersey. I don’t often feel confident or competent enough to offer any thoughts about topics of national interest. I’m making an exception today. Excuse me in advance for wading into things beyond my ken.

It’s been an extraordinary week in America, one that started by an act of terror born from the ancient racial hatred that has been this nation’s original sin since a century before its founding, and which troubles us and holds us back to this day. It finished on Friday, with two separate yet related acts of hope, healing and progress in themselves, and which also strike me as perfect metaphors for how this country – in fits and starts – manages to find its way forward.

At this time last weekend I, like most Americans, was reeling from the murders of nine people at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina on June 17. This was a premeditated and deliberate act of political terror that was specifically intended to set off further acts of racially-motivated violence. We know this because the alleged assassin wrote what’s been described as a “manifesto” laying out his objectives for his crime, motivated by a deep-seated hatred for African Americans, Jews, and Hispanics.

Although Dylan Roof’s personal and political history and associations are not yet fully known, his ideas and motivations are not his alone. His extremism is shared by many, too many, people. Although by no means mainstream opinions, they are also neither rare nor new. This article by Laura Miller in Salon.com this week describes troubling links between the ideas contained in Roof’s “manifesto” and those spread by the fringe movement known as “Christian Identity” It’s very troubling to me that there are Americans moved to commit this kind of political terror in furtherance of a sick ideology and theology that seeks to deny fellow Americans their human dignity and even, as we saw in Charleston, their lives. It was pretty hard to endure a week of news stories about Charleston and its aftermath, hard to contemplate this latest in a long, long line  of outrages stretching not only as far back as we can see but threatening to continue long into our common futures. Not a happy prospect, indeed.

That’s why I was pretty well primed, I suppose, for the news out of the Supreme Court yesterday. By a slim majority, 5 to 4 (close is good enough not only in horseshoes and hand grenades, but in SCOTUS decisions, too), the Court ruled that the institution of marriage is one that belongs to all Americans. I was very pleased in the substance of the decision, feeling it was entirely fair and overdue. But I was also very happy to read Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion on behalf of himself and his four concurring colleagues, and understand the basis of his reasoning in the case known as Obergefell v. Hodges.

To this layman, the legal underpinnings and case law citations included in Kennedy’s opinion seem sound; however, I can’t comment any more on that. I have read commentary by several legal scholars who deem the Court’s reasoning sound, and that is good enough for me. What I find thrilling and hopeful from yesterday’s decision is that much of its underlying power comes from an interpretation of American, and indeed human, history, and a conception of human freedom I very much agree with. That conception is based on the underlying premise that Freedom and Justice are concepts which, although eternal at their hearts, change and grow with changes and growth in the human condition. Justice Kennedy says,

The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times. The generations that wrote the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all its dimensions, and so they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the rights of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning. When new insight reveals discord between the Constitution’s central protections and a received legal structure, a claim to liberty must be addressed.

What a wonderful and powerful formulation this is. The Constitution and its provisions were designed to protect “the rights of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning.” As we gain new insights into ever new and varied meanings, freedom and liberty does not always come easily. “A claim to liberty” must be made, and crucially in our system, “must be addressed.”

Friday’s ruling was the culmination of a textbook example as to how such claims are addressed. In  courtrooms and legislatures around the country, for a period of over twenty years, a process full of dialog, argument, engagement, litigation and referenda was undertaken that created momentum that led to this landmark. It was a process that went forward, and back, and it was an entirely peaceful process. The history of how marriage equality has become the law of the land will become a textbook example for decades to come of how to create a revolution in American law.

And yet, even a Supreme Court Justice acknowledges that such revolutions do not come to pass entirely in courts or the halls of government. In many crucial ways, this revolution was ratified in these places, but they were not born there. Earlier in his opinion, Kennedy says, speaking of the ways that new ideas and attitudes about the institution of marriage have come to the mainstream,

These new insights have strengthened, not weakened, the institution of marriage. Indeed, changed understandings of marriage are characteristic of a Nation where new dimensions of freedom become apparent to new generations, often through perspectives that begin in pleas or protests, and then are considered in the political sphere and the judicial process.

And, to make sure that we are keenly aware that behind the vague, generic concept of “pleas and protests” are the actual stories of individuals and families who are directly affected by the legal matter at hand. People whose lives will be  intimately and irrevocably changed by the resulting rulings. Justice Kennedy tells the stories of James Obergefell and John Arthur, April DeBoer and Jayne Rouse, and Army Reserve First Sergeant First Class Ijipe DeKoe and Thomas Kastura.

These are the people whose claim to liberty was addressed. And, as the result of a 20-year process the result of which was unthinkable even just a little while ago, we learned that the meaning of liberty – in this immediate matter of the institution of marriage – could be expanded to include Every American.

Is this a great country, or what?

Of course, there are many who do not agree or accept the result and the implications of Friday’s ruling. Four members of the Supreme Court wrote individual dissents stating their opposition to the reasoning and principles of the majority. They were joined by many in public life, including several announced presidential candidates.

Although I am sure that many of these opponents disagree with the outcome of this case on sincerely held grounds of principle, I find it difficult to believe that the four dissenting Justices and many who agree with them object to the Court granting human dignity and equal consideration under law to fellow American citizens of flesh and blood, and yet had no problem five years ago with granting that same dignity and personhood to… corporations!

To paraphrase Chief Justice John Roberts from his dissent, Just who do they think they are?

This isn’t the end of this particular story, of course. There is still strong opposition, some of it genuinely principled as I mentioned, but a lot of purely opportunistic pandering. That sort of thing will never go away in this country as long as someone thinks they can get a couple of votes or make a couple of dollars by opportunistic pandering. That, in my opinion, will be forever.

But I feel happier and more confident in this country by knowing that, at least on occasion, we can recognize that Freedom and Liberty are not static and unchanging things bequeathed to us over two centuries ago. They live, and breathe, and learn, and expand – as we are given new insights to know their new meanings.

I heard distinct echoes and emphases of these same ideas in the extraordinary words of President Obama on Friday, in his remarkably profound and moving eulogy in South Carolina for one of those lost at Emanuel Church, Pastor and South Carolina State Senator Clementa Pinckney.

I can’t, and won’t attempt, to summarize the whole of Mr. Obama’s words. I will, first, refer you to watch his entire eulogy (well worth 36 minutes and 46 seconds, trust me!), or at least to read the transcript. Theodore Roosevelt once famously called the Presidency “a bully pulpit,” and a pulpit it was in Charleston on Friday. Barack Obama preached.

The main theme of the President’s remarks was Grace: the gift – should we choose to freely accept it – of finding in vile, wicked and violent acts the potential for hope, and learning, and healing. From the actions of a murderer whose clear intent was to spread hate and fear and discord, it is possible – not assured, but only possible – to draw strength, resolve, and even forgiveness. This potential power to produce such a contradictory result in the face of despair and pain Mr. Obama calls nothing less than Divine, a gift of a loving Providence. The gift of Grace:

According to the Christian tradition, grace is not earned.  Grace is not merited.  It’s not something we deserve.  Rather, grace is the free and benevolent favor of God — (applause) — as manifested in the salvation of sinners and the bestowal of blessings.  Grace.

As a nation, out of this terrible tragedy, God has visited grace upon us, for he has allowed us to see where we’ve been blind. He has given us the chance, where we’ve been lost, to find our best selves. We may not have earned it, this grace, with our rancor and complacency, and short-sightedness and fear of each other — but we got it all the same.  He gave it to us anyway.  He’s once more given us grace.  But it is up to us now to make the most of it, to receive it with gratitude, and to prove ourselves worthy of this gift.

For too long, we were blind to the pain that the Confederate flag stirred in too many of our citizens. It’s true, a flag did not cause these murders.  But as people from all walks of life, Republicans and Democrats, now acknowledge — including Governor Haley, whose recent eloquence on the subject is worthy of praise — as we all have to acknowledge, the flag has always represented more than just ancestral pride. For many, black and white, that flag was a reminder of systemic oppression and racial subjugation.  We see that now.

Removing the flag from this state’s capitol would not be an act of political correctness; it would not be an insult to the valor of Confederate soldiers.  It would simply be an acknowledgment that the cause for which they fought — the cause of slavery — was wrong — the imposition of Jim Crow after the Civil War, the resistance to civil rights for all people was wrong.  It would be one step in an honest accounting of America’s history; a modest but meaningful balm for so many unhealed wounds.  It would be an expression of the amazing changes that have transformed this state and this country for the better, because of the work of so many people of goodwill, people of all races striving to form a more perfect union.  By taking down that flag, we express God’s grace.

But I don’t think God wants us to stop there. For too long, we’ve been blind to the way past injustices continue to shape the present.  Perhaps we see that now.  Perhaps this tragedy causes us to ask some tough questions about how we can permit so many of our children to languish in poverty, or attend dilapidated schools, or grow up without prospects for a job or for a career.

Perhaps it causes us to examine what we’re doing to cause some of our children to hate.    Perhaps it softens hearts towards those lost young men, tens and tens of thousands caught up in the criminal justice system — and leads us to make sure that that system is not infected with bias; that we embrace changes in how we train and equip our police so that the bonds of trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve make us all safer and more secure.

Maybe we now realize the way racial bias can infect us even when we don’t realize it, so that we’re guarding against not just racial slurs, but we’re also guarding against the subtle impulse to call Johnny back for a job interview but not Jamal. So that we search our hearts when we consider laws to make it harder for some of our fellow citizens to vote.  By recognizing our common humanity by treating every child as important, regardless of the color of their skin or the station into which they were born, and to do what’s necessary to make opportunity real for every American — by doing that, we express God’s grace.

Justice Kennedy didn’t use the word, but I think he says the same thing here. In the American legal and political tradition, we have on many occasions in our history been Graced with the ability to “learn” new meanings of liberty and freedom through “new insights,” and to address many claims to extend the benefits and blessings of that liberty and freedom and human dignity ever wider. We have been fortunate – lucky, maybe? blessed? – that so many of these claims are met peacefully, as we saw on Friday. How can this not be called Grace, as Mr. Obama told us? When the Supreme Court says, “The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times,” that is simply another way of saying, “I was blind, but now I see.”

President Obama reminded us that we are not so lucky to learn all of our lessons in peace. In fact some lessons, such as those that spring from the bottomless well of undying racial hatred that has been part of our history, are taught at fearsome cost in blood and lives. Yet we may still learn from those lessons, if we are so Graced. Amazing, indeed.

In one day, our Supreme Court and our President both drew on two strong and ancient traditions in this to teach us that we have the capacity – if we choose to accept the gift – not to be trapped by our past. We can more perfect our Union, and ourselves. It’s not a gift that is always given to us. It’s certainly not one that is given uniquely to this nation alone. And it is by no means given to all of us (I’m looking at you, Rick Santorum!).

But I feel to my bones that we in the United States of America were given the gift of Grace, twice, on Friday. After this week, did we ever need it!

And for that, I give thanks.