Justice and the law

The law only ensures legality, not justice. Some laws are unjust, as Thoreau, Gandhi, and MLK showed us, and being merely legally right masks real injustice.

Laws can change; justice is something unchangeable that we are called toward. Laws are made to give force, flesh and bones to justice. Circumstances can change the laws for the sake of justice. Our Constitution was originally written to protect 15% of the population who were white males owning property. The Bill of Rights gave some protection to minorities, but has proved inadequate.

At times, retaining a law is absurd. There may have been a time when the right to bear arms by all citizens made sense and was justified, so part of justice. But when the proliferation of armaments of all sorts risks life and limb is as plain as the nose on your face, then an attitude of the fundamentalist reading of 'what the writers of the Constitution intended' is absurd--such a reading would re-establish slavery.

The law is always exposed to the call of justice so that it can be reinvented by that call. Giving the most powerful entities in our world system even more power to implement its often-destructive agenda may be legal, but it is hardly justice. Remember that justice may be blind but the law sees very clearly whom it is serving. Legislatures who formulate laws and who are controlled by outside forces destructive of the common good do not necessarily pursue justice.

The Constitution was written, in its own words, ..."in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." 'Establishing justice" and 'the general Welfare' have been sacrifice to some appearance of 'domestic Tranquility,' and makes securing 'the Blessing of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity' pretty doubtful.

So the Supreme Court's work, though under the call of justice, has to do with the interpretation of law. "The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court...' [Constitution, Article III] It judicial focus means it is interpreting the law as legislated and the law's relation to the Constitution. Like fundamentalist Bible readers, some justices see their function as merely preserving [fossilizing?] the words of the text. But, in the real world, we adapt a text to the common good or, here, to justice. So the court's decisions on civil rights and environmental law were a realization that we had grown since 1788 and understood that justice was foremost and that law must reinforce justice.

The recent Supreme Court's decision a limited to legality and have little to do with justice--in my very humble opinion.

Hope in weakness

As John D. Caputo tells us, weakness is stronger than power--thus Jesus' God chose the weak to confound the strong, those who are nothing to overcome those who are 'something.' Such weakness undermines the Dominant Powers like relentless water wears through the land. Gandhi, MLK, Dorothy Day, and Nelson Mandela showed us the way of weakness which stands strong in its refusal to use the tools of destruction to bring about healing, to kill in order to stop killing. The world itself must enter the belly of Jonah's whale to be made whole--and it enters the dark one person at a time.

The Stifling of the Spirit

The Vatican's move to make conversion to the Roman church 'easier' for Anglicans and Episcopalians who object to their Church's position on the ordination of women and on the union or ordination of gay and lesbian candidates makes the Vatican a sponge for the intellectual refuse of a courageous group of followers of Jesus of Nazareth. At a time when the world is fissioning along ideological grounds, Rome, instead of reaching out to heal, takes advantage of ignorance and hatred to increase the number of its own sterile clerics.

-The world needs wisdom, the Roman church gives confusion as confession.

-The world needs healing, the Roman church re-infects ancient wounds.

-The world needs vision, the Roman church gives myopic self-service.

This church will grow smaller, as it ought. Those who sincerely seek the way of God will depart this doomed adventure. On a statue of Livery overlooking the Vatican: "Give me your stupid, your fearful yearning to breathe free--I will give them the freedom of slavery and the wisdom of ignorance ....I lift my torch beside the Penal gate."

A great opportunity

Obama's going to the U.N. and chairing the hearing on nuclear weapons is a marvelous opportunity for the United States to rejoin the world in its search for peace grounded in justice. Often the most idealistic and visionary path is the only one with any possibility of true success. Such is the case here.

On November 4, Barack Obama helped this nation see beyond accidentals to essential competence. Now he has the chance to help this nation and the world see beyond the illusion of nationalist boundaries to the interdependent Earth we all inhabit and of which we are all citizens--except for some who've turned in their papers like Newt Gingerich.

Can't we do better than this?

If the conduct of the minority in Congress during President Obama's speech is any indication, the anti-Obama, anti-government, anti-everything clique is shrinking to a few pea-brained white guys with Midwest and Southern connections.

In the House, John Boehner from Ohio and Mike Pence from Indiana come out near the top in inane and misinforming blather, while Mitch McConnell from Kentucky seems to want to assume the robes of the late Strom Thurmond as primary crazy old cracker--maybe we're dealing with Kentucky Fried Brains here, though the fact that McConnell leads the Senate in PAC money might mean he's just the GWB Charley McCarthy in a new Dick Cheney Puppet Master's hands.

The clear racism of the right is shining through for anyone caring to see it. The movement to destroy Obama's presidency is grounded in white fear that a man of color will succeed in implementing programs white presidents have failed to pass over the past century.

--from an old retired white guy in southern Indiana

Jefferson and Health Care

Each of us can have thier own opinion on what any word means, but I was not giving you my opinion on what the Declaration says. The onlty thing I was doing was trying to address what the writers of the Declaration meant by those words--what we might mean is something else. Reading Jefferson, Adams, Hancock, and Franklin make it clear that Jefferson meant the words 'pursuit of happiness' to reference Aristotle's theory of humanity in which he uses that term--remember that most of the people in the Continental Congress were well versed in history and philosophy and would have known what Jefferson's reference was. This is grounded in a lot of historical scholarship on the development of the underlying vision of humanity that emerged in the Declaration during the period called the Enlightenment. Jefferson's referencing Aristotle would be somewhat like your or my using, "of the people, for the people, by the people"--most readers or hearers would know that we were quoting Lincoln.

So your discussion about what you mean by pursuit of happiness is interesting and has real insight---it's just not what Jefferson technically meant when he used the words.

Much of what the Supreme Court does is to interpret or to figure out what the writers of the Constitution meant when they talked about "freedom of speech," "establishment, " "the right to bear arms," "self incrimination," "privacy," and the like, and then to apply that interpretation to the present. They aren't free to use their own opinion about what any of those word means in their own lives--that's what makes the job difficult since a justice might have to rule against his or her own feelings about what the word means in order to be true to the meaning of the drafters of the Constitution.

This may be a point for discussion:

"The only orthodox object of the institution of government is to secure the greatest degree of happiness possible to the general mass of those associated under it." (Thomas Jefferson to M. van der Kemp, 1812)

So, as he said in the Declaration, "...to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.'

Again, remembering what Jefferson meant by 'happiness,' government's function is to secure the rights of the governed--so government will naturally interfere if your rights are being violated. For what other reason would we have a police force or military?

Jefferson was especially conscious of the need to protect the rights of the weakest in our society: "In America, no other distinction between man and man had ever been known but that of persons in office exercising powers by authority of the laws, and private individuals. Among these last, the poorest laborer stood on equal ground with the wealthiest millionaire, and generally on a more favored one whenever their rights seem to jar." (Thomas Jefferson: Answers to de Meusnier Questions, 1786) So, those unable to exercise their natural rights because they do not have access to good health are more the concern of good government than those who can afford whatever they want. What good is a right to 'life' if you can't achieve it? "The right to use a thing comprehends a right to the means necessary to its use, and without which it would be useless." (Thomas Jefferson to William Carmichael, 1790)

*****

There is nothing unusual about federal and state run programs that work very well.

Social Security is a good example: Social Security by itself has been one of the most successful programs the U.S. ever initiated; it was totally solvent and even had a surplus. That surplus would still be there if it weren't for the fact that, since the time of LBJ, presidents have regularly raided Social Security's funding to pay for programs that then don't appear in the budget. Much of the extraordinary costs of the Vietnam War were paid for by taking (stealing?--I guess if the president does it, it's legal....right?) money from the SS principal. Much of the tax rebate in the early part of GWB's term came for a $500,000,000,000 "contribution" from SS--so YOU and I paid for rolling back the taxes on the top 1/2% of money earners in the county; those of us who've taken the most from the system would seem to owe the most back--it doesn't work that way.

Some highly ethical people like Warren Buffett, CEO now of Geico among many other things, have refused SS, refused the tax refund from G. Bush, and have voluntarily paid a higher level of taxes than they are required to do because they feel a greater responsibility because of their own successes--Bill Gates has done similar things. That takes a special kind of person though. By the way, Geico is at the forefront in supporting fundamental health reform.

So, community programs (which is another name for government programs) can work well and have worked well. The idea that all government programs are uneconomical and run by incompetents just doesn't have any ground in facts.

It's a difficult thing, and there's no simple solution; only those without full information would make this a polarizing battle separating people who need to work together into opposing camps. I am not going to let that happen to me since I don't identity with any political ideology or party--some of you who've seen what I've written in the Dearborn County papers will know that I'm willing to support or offend anyone if it's appropriate--but the time comes when we are called to do the right thing--and that's really the bottom line here.

Health Care

First of all, this has nothing to do with simple labels like 'conservative' and 'liberal' which carnival hawkers on all sides have been using to divide us. I don't have the slightest idea what those things mean since a person who appeals to the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution is called a 'liberal' while one who cites the practices of the late 19th and early 20th century is called a 'consevative.' They are meaningless and empty words which refer to nothing at all except what we might decide to agree upon in a given discussion.

Also, examples from other countries are pretty meaningless because our health care, like our education, our economic policies, and all other functions of private and public sectors are based on the U. S. Constitution--not that of Canada, Iceland, France, Russian, or any other nation.

Jefferson told us in our founding document that 'all men (sic) are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator (not a government) with certain inalieanable rights, that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.' It seems important to understand what Jefferson meant by those words when he wrote them or when they were revised in the Continental Congress.

Clearly the right to 'life' has been argued for over 200 years and the Supreme Court has made no final decisions on what that means in our form of government--which is different from what some religious or theological system might mean by the same thing. [The non-establishment clause of the first amendment to our Constitution addressed this and it has been implemented with varying success.] One thing Jefferson and those following him did insist upon was that life could not be denied a person without due cause--that grounds our fifth amendment. Is the inability to get the health care that can assure life to a reasonable degree compatible with this statement of our very mission and purpose as a nation?

'Liberty' is a tricky thing since those incapable of free choice and those who have shown their choices to be harmful to the community can have that freedom removed by the rest of the community. Children, the mentally or emotionally incompetent, and criminals forego their liberty for innate reason or for free choices harmful to the community. For those who can exercise it, this liberty or freedom means having the means to lead the fullest human life available, to have freedom of opportunity. Avoidable disability from disease or from lack of access unavailable instruments for recuperation from accidents or other events which stand in the way of this liberty viciate the freedom stated as part of our very vision of ourselves as a nation.

'The pursuit of happiness' is, for Jefferson, a technical term based on Aristotle. It means fulfilling the potentials each has for a full human life--becoming the person each of us was meant to be in and for ourselves as well as for the community to which we make contributions which profit the whole commonwealth; it means developing the talents and abilities with which we are born. Things that impare that ability to live a fully human life can be circumstances of two kinds, unavoidable and avoidable. Unavoidable circumstances are outside what a community can address or alleviate. Avoidable obstacles are the responsibility of the rest of us to help remove for those encumberered with them. Not doing so weakens the whole social fabric. A farm worker in Dearborn Co. who is not able to contribute to the economy of the community because he or she cannot afford the treatment, which would bring him back to the condition in which he or she can contribute to the rest of us, creates a situation in which all of us lose both from the loss of service and from the burden such a person places on family, friends, and the resources of the community itself.

So the problems with health care are complex, but they are based on a further understanding of the nation that our founders envisioned. They gave us a mission statement which we have not fulfilled and which is large enough that could never fulfill it--it acts like a guide beyond our reach which shapes our decisions. None of these people expected 2009 to be like 1776 or 1788; they expected us to use the principle, which make us the nation we are, and to apply those to the present circumstances. They also realized that we would discover things that they did not know and that this new knowledge would change our way of acting--for instance, the custom taxes were sufficient to the running of government untile the second decade of the 20th century, when earnings taxes became necessary.

So this disussion about heath care reform is not about factions in society or about special interests who profit from any one system; it is not about parties, which have pretty much become clones of each other--it's why I have left both of them; it's not about handouts or some special treatment by government--it is about govenment working the way it should. One of the functions of government which all can agree upon is the defense of our nation, but we too often think of that in terms of limiting or hostile pressures from outside instead of those which exist within our own nation. No nation based on the power of money has ever survived for long--see 18th century France, 20th century Britain, and actually the Soviet Union--commerce without principle is destructive both to the Earth and to the human and non-human parts of the Earth. Also, since 9/11 we have been obsessed with terrorists from outside, not realizing that, until that date, none of us had much reason to fear foreign terrorists while the threat of forces of violence within our own nation threatened us as they still do. Many more causualties than the 3000+ of September 11 are recorded from acts of Americans against Americans--we don't seem to care much about that.

Health care is not the political issue it's being portrayed as but a test on whether we are going to be the growing and developing nation our founders gave us the tools to become or merely a backwater from which the corrupt and manipulative can make their petty fortune and leave the rest of the community to fend for itself. We are no longer the leader of this world in democacy or freedom; no one looks to us as a model of what democracy can be. That's not all bad since each people have to find thier own way of governing. The real issue has nothing to do with what others are doing but with what kind of a nation we want to be. Do we want our grandchildren to curse us for not having the courage to make hard choices in many areas beyond health care or will they admire us for doing what was right when the forces that would profit from the miserable status quo were battering the nation with lies, false information, silly inuendoes, and fear tactics creating paranoia?

That's the choice. It's not easy, but it has to be made with wisdom and with some faith in our own national vision and in the system we call the United States of America--we'd like to make it one that God could truly bless, so the words of the song are not a meaningless whistling in the dark.