Court Jesters July 2, 2023

This is my family. We love each other, work hard, help our neighbors, vote, pay taxes and spend our dollars locally as much as possible.  We’re fairly ordinary and I continue to be amazed that we are so threatening to some people’s religious beliefs that the Supreme Court had to step in and decide whether a web designer had to make a website for two gay men who were getting married. Earlier you may recall that it was about a pastry chef’s refusal to bake a cake for a gay couple. Surely there are more important concerns and, yes, I understand the constitutional argument for both sides. I am not minimising the importance of religious freedom. 

This most recent ruling wasn’t about religious freedom. It is about gutting the hope for real democracy, who is included and who is excluded. Same old story. Our Constitution was flawed and remains flawed. Vulnerable people were not the concern at the time of its creation. Article one, section two declared that any person who was not free would be counted as three-fifths of a free individual for the purposes of determining congressional representation. The "Three-Fifths Clause" thus increased the political power of slaveholding states. It did not, however, make any attempt to ensure that the interests of slaves would be represented in the government. Our nation’s leaders have found all kinds of creative and devastating ways to diminish opportunity for Black Americans over the past 400 years and the most recent Supreme Court decision to remove affirmative action is deja vu. 

Our Constitution did not mention women. In 1923, suffragist Alice Paul drafted the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). She proposed: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.  The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.” 

The text of the amendment is simple, elegant, and difficult to disagree with. But it has yet to be added to the US Constitution. 

We’ve used the Constitution to steal land from tribal people who lived here long before we did. We’ve used it to incarcerate Japanese American citizens. We’ve used it to ensure that people who should never own a gun can buy as many as they want. The Constitution is flawed but it isn’t the real problem but rather the people who get to twist it, use it, interpret it and manipulate it to their own ends. 

The fact that the majority of Justices decided to remove women’s right to choose and blow up affirmative action, deny school loan forgiveness and more suggests that they have strayed beyond any hope I have for their redemption. I am grieving this mockery of our democratic system. 

For most of my adult life, I have been denied many legal protections that my friends and neighbors who are not LGBTQ2+ have. We’ve managed to live our lives well anyway. We’ve tried to do so with integrity and empathy, even compassion for people we love who hurt us.  We have endured long-tenured friends telling us how much they love us while telling us that they cannot support same sex marriage. As Sue and I have now been together 43 years and married since it became legal in Canada, we do not feel the need to engage with our friends when they disagree with who we are. However you define marriage, if we’re not it, I do not know what is. 

My world will not end because someone doesn’t want to serve me lunch or do my hair, but the message it sends to my grandchild and your grandchildren is chilling. The precedent and path it suggests should scare all of us. 

The US Supreme Court rulings this week have left our family legally, socially, politically and emotionally vulnerable in ways that I knew were possible but I hoped improbable. For most of my life, I have believed that Americans resist, even reject totalitarianism — a form of government in which the state has no limits in authority and does whatever it wants. The recent rulings of the Supreme Court suggest that I was wrong. Most Americans did absolutely nothing to object to the rulings and, by default, did nothing to defend their own rights within our democracy. By ignoring the systematic stripping away of the rights of women, LGBTQ2+ citizens, minoritized students, most Americans don’t even recognize the threat to their own rights. 

“Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia showed us what totalitarianism breeds but we often ignore  how it emerged. As Hannah Arendt explains in The Origins of Totalitarianism, totalitarianism is just one possibility along a path that most countries are on at one time or another. And that is why it is so important to understand what it is.”https://fs.blog/the-dictators-handbook/

Arendt further says: “One of the most disturbing things about Nazism in Germany is how quickly the country changed. They went from democracy to concentration camps in fewer than ten years.” We are changing rapidly here as well. 

In many modern democracies, we can see evidence of indifference and pervasive feelings of helplessness. There is low voter turnout and an assumption that things will be the way they are no matter what an individual does. It seems counterintuitive that apathy is catalytic but, as Arendt suggests, “There is pent-up energy in apathy.”

January 6 showed us what that pent-up energy looks like and how it acts. Arendt argues that there is a “possibility that gigantic lies and monstrous falsehoods can eventually be established as unquestioned facts…that the difference between truth and falsehood may cease to be objective and become a mere matter of power and cleverness, of pressure and infinite repetition.

Opinions are being given the same weight as facts, leading to endless debates and the assumption that nothing can be known anyway.

It is this turning away from knowledge that opens the doors to totalitarianism. Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it…The carnage they create tears apart all social fabric. And we must not assume that they exist only in the past.”

The actions of 6 members of our Supreme Court, combined with our state legislators churning out 500+ laws to restrict health care for trans children and adults, strip teaching about families like mine and more —

We are there. Democracy is a dying dream here. To resurrect it is truly an act of defiance and the people who are willing to react are being shut out, shut up and shut down.  

We have a three-pronged system of checks and balances. Our judiciary, House and Senate can be reformed and we must decide if we have the will to insist. 

Our grandchildren’s opportunity to live in a democratic nation depends on that insistence. Our individual and collective will determines their inheritance. Freedom or not is up to us.