civility

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Government by the Menacing

Yesterday the New York Times noted that the vacationing men and women of Congress were holding fewer Town Hall Meetings to get the pulse of the people. Maybe it’s because the people are not well represented at these meetings. Increasingly the meetings are dominated by ruthless and menacing citizens zeroing in on a volatile issue like immigration or health care reform or the current anti-abortion legislation. The discourse on these issues has degenerated to threat and indignation with the intent to intimidate rather than inform.

Admittedly I have not attended such forums, and the media reports mostly on the sensational episodes of the Town Hall. But I am not likely attend as long as the occasion is hijacked by fanatical groups hoping to scare the wits out of their representative with the message that moderation will be summarily punished at the polls in 2014.  And apparently our legislators have reached the same conclusion about Town Hall Meetings.

I don’t blame them.  Our legislators and I would like to believe they vote their conscience or at least the will of their district in the Halls of Congress. If they have been bullied into concessions by our most strident citizens or at least intimidated enough to vote only with their Party, they give up their independence and their conscience.  They become the lackeys of an outraged minority.

Most Congressional representatives will declare they are independent and unswayed by threats, but their lockstep voting with their Party and their 38 symbolic votes against Affordable Care indicate a certain suppleness in the spine.  There are few courageous votes like those few who defied their Party to vote in favor of background checks for gun owners.  In the House of Representatives there is hardly any legislation at all.

Washington is awash in currents of power, so there are multiple causes of the failure to legislate. But the uncivil interests of all stripes, from nativists to abortion rights radicals, can take some credit for the inertia, the sabotage of deliberation in Congress.  Every vote has become fraught with risk.

To those who rule by the volume of their demands or threaten by criminalizing compromise, I would like to say, “Shut up!”  But I won’t, because that would be uncivil.

But I would like to speak for the civil voices, who manage to express their political will by collecting signatures or writing a blog or peacefully protesting or with restrained debate.  We are not intimidated by the volume of your campaign or the fire in your threats.  We are not moved by your stubbornness and unwillingness to listen.  We are not backing down in the face of your apoplexy. We are going to write and speak and vote our consciences as if you were mere static in the air waves.

And the government of the most vocal, by the most ruthless and for the most menacing shall perish from the earth.

 

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The Seed Among Thorns

What is sown among the thorns is the man who hears the word, but the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth choke it, making it unfruitful” (Matthew 13:22).

The Parable of the Sower tells us everything we need to know about teaching.  It’s not the seed we sow, but the soil it falls on.  And the corollary to that is: There are no sacred documents, but there are sanctifying and corrupting documents.  So we should stop grasping at symbols and instead preserve the spirit that gives them life.

The U.S. Constitution received a lot of symbolic attention at the opening of Congress, but even more serious scrutiny as we heard Congresswoman Giffords read the First Amendment with great conviction.  We heard  it in the context of a citizen violating her right to speak and assemble, indeed violating her right to live. And then we heard it in the context of a national conversation about how we should speak and the limits of political discourse. That has been an inspiring conversation.

When citizens talk about what free speech means, then we are revering the Constitution, not when we give it a public oration, congratulating ourselves that we have a splendid document to govern us.  We revere the Constitution when we ask ourselves how its seeds fall among us, how they invade and transform our hearts.  Our country has had a period of serious self-examination, because of the events following the reading of the First Amendment, but not from the words of themselves.

The words themselves may sow corruption. Before 1964, the Constitution did not protect the voting rights of all citizens. Before 1920 the Constitution did not protect the voting rights of half of its citizens.  It was good seed, but it fell in bad soil. But some of the seed fell on good soil, and it produced the Nineteenth and the Twenty-fourth Amendments. The Constitution would be sham without them.

The First and Second Amendments to the Constitution have been driven north, south, east, and west in attempts to justify what citizens wanted and believed.   Opponents on both sides of political controversy have invoked the same amendments to their advantage. Corrupting and sanctifying. That is how laws get made and rights are protected. To invoke those amendments as though they inherently protected our political convictions misses their point. They are the seeds sown by our Founders. We are the soil they fall upon. We should be more concerned with the soil, than who owns the seed.

Let’s stop invoking the Constitution as if it were the guarantee of everything we want. Let’s stop demonizing those who disagree with us as though they were the enemies of the Constitution. Let’s stop using the Constitution as a symbol and remember that its value is in how we live it.

Jesus compared the word of God to seed. If the word of God is no more than seed, which is barren without soil, how can we presume that the words of men, however eloquent, can be any more than that? How can we use that word against our fellow citizens, when we are all soil, all the resting place of seed, the producers of fruit?

When we are considering the limits of free speech, we might consider if we are the soil for our treasured documents or the thorns.