This is the full text of a talk I delivered today to the Ethical Humanist Society of the Triangle in Chapel Hill, NC. It builds on themes and language I have begun to develop in earlier blog posts. I hope to continue fleshing out these ideas as I go forward, but the main shape of the argument can be seen here.
On June 25, in the case of Shelby County v. Holder, the United
States Supreme Court held that the portion of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that
required all or parts of 15 states to submit changes in voting laws to the
Justice Department—so-called "preclearance"—could not be enforced. In the majority opinion, signed on to by
Justices Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito, the objection was raised
that the formula used to determine which areas needed preclearance was
inadequate. They failed, according to
the majority, to take into account demographic and voter registration changes
in the 48 years since the original act was passed. Within hours, led by Texas, states whose
attempts to implement measures such as voter ID, restricted early voting hours,
purges of the voting rolls, etc., but had been prevented by the preclearance
requirement, began pushing to do so. A
few days after the ruling, eleven of the fifteen states affected had started
such a push. This is part of a larger,
nationwide push to implement new voting regulations. Advocates for these measures see them as a
hedge against what most experts say is non-existent voter fraud; critics have
noted that these measures tend to raise barriers to minority participation, the
very problem the Voting Rights Act was implemented to fix.
A day later, the court handed down decisions
in two cases related to same-sex marriage.
In the case of United States v.
Windsor, a court majority consisting of justices Kennedy, Ginsburg, Breyer,
Sotomayor and Kagan ruled that the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which stated
that the federal government would not recognize same-sex marriages, was an
unconstitutional violation of equal protection.
In the case of Hollinsgworth v.
Perry, an odd combination of justices Roberts, Scalia, Ginsburg, Breyer and
Kagan essentially confirmed a California decision overturning Proposition 8,
which banned gay marriages in the state.
By invalidating the case on the technical grounds that plaintiffs had no
standing to contest the ruling, they paved the way for same-sex marriages to
resume in California.
Over the last couple of weeks, the
abortion issue has come to the forefront.
In Texas, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin and, as you might have noted, here in
North Carolina, Republican-led assemblies have rushed to implement new restrictions,
perhaps as a push to overturn the 1973 Roe
v. Wade decision.
How are we to make sense of these
developments? Why are they happening at
this historical moment? On the one hand,
the same-sex marriage rulings can be seen as a blow for personal freedoms. On the other, there seems little doubt that
the efforts in statehouses to change voting rules and increase abortion
restrictions serve to limit individual freedoms. One of the standard narratives is that these
represent some sort of backlash stemming
from the election of the nation's first African-American president. Voting rights, abortion rights and same-sex
marriage are near and dear to the president and to Democrats, after all, and
whatever he is for Republicans must be against.
Yet while most of the proponents of the rollback on voting and abortion
rights are Republicans and while Republicans are certainly the inheritors of
the racist Democratic coalition that broke up in part because of the push for
civil rights that included the Voting Rights Act, this seems insufficient.
For one thing, moves to restrict
abortion and to tighten voting regulations have a history that pre-dates the
current administration. Certainly in the case of abortion, in places the
push to restrict access to the procedure immediately post-dates the Roe v. Wade. And states targeted
under the Voting Rights Act of 1965 have long tried to skirt the act's
provision, attempting to follow the law's letter while ignoring its spirit, a
push that has intensified in the last ten years, especially in the south as
more southern states were dominated by the Republican party. But these
voices have never been sufficient to do much damage until now.
Same-sex marriage, for its part, has
always been at a legal disability and it has been suggested more than once that
the push for their recognition is the next stage in the struggle to extend the
promise of America to all of her citizens.
It's advance seems something of an anomaly, since its opponents are the
same crowd working on abortion and voting restrictions.
I would like to suggest, however, that
the DOMA and Prop 8 decisions are, in fact, not anomalies. Rather, they
confirm the pattern that includes the erosion of basic liberties for certain
groups of citizens, especially women and racial minorities. For this
reason, while we should praise the signal these decisions send that there is no
constitutional impediment to marriage equality, we should be careful to follow
this victory with concerted action to make sure this equality extends to all
citizens, not only to those in the affected states. Because what these
rulings actually seem to do, at least until further legal action, is return the
decision over who can marry whom to the states. This handover of
authority on matters of basic civil liberties to state governments is
part of the process that is also leading to erosions in women's and minorities'
rights.
What we are witnessing, I contend, is
the unraveling of what I will call the American orthodoxy. This orthodoxy
is one that was established in stages from the aftermath of the Civil War
through the middle of the 1970s. At its core was an extension, albeit
imperfect and uneven, of the promise inherent in America's founding documents,
to those whom it had previously been construed to exclude. It began to be
attacked in the late 1970s by an alliance of Republican politicians and
adherents to a certain brand of Protestant ideology. Following the
conclusion of the Cold War, it truly began to unravel.
Though I contend that the orthodoxy that
is unraveling began to form in the aftermath of the Civil War, its roots are
well-known and stretch back to the founding moments of the nation. The first definitive statement is the famous section
in the Declaration of Independence that has been called the "American
creed."
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. That whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it.
There is danger in these words, which
can be used by individuals as a weapon against the common good. But there is also promise in them, a promise
of equality for all citizens, indeed of all men and women. This is the first component of the American
orthodoxy.
When the Revolution was over and the
business of war became the business of governing, of setting up institutions to
secure the rights that were ours, further adjustment was needed. Our first attempt at self-governance, the
Articles of Confederation, was inadequate to the task of governing the new
nation, as it left too much power to the individual states. So, important figures from the republic met
in Philadelphia in 1787 to change the Articles, but instead scrapped them in
favor of a charter they drafted in secret, the Constitution, which was adopted
in 1789. From the start, the Framers set
lofty goals:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
While the Declaration set the goals of
government as promoting rights to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of
Happiness," the Preamble to the Constitution spelled out what that promise
entailed. Challenged by the shortcomings
of the Articles of Confederation, subject to pressures that might have torn the
new country apart, the delegates in Philadelphia refined the American orthodoxy
to include the kind of actions the new government would need to take in pursuit
of this goal.
The great challenge of American history
has been the effort to extend the promises inherent in these passages to all. Voting rights, perhaps the greatest marker of
full participation as a citizen, provide us with the best marker for how much
progress has been made. For the first
half of the nineteenth century, we can see the franchise, originally the
province of elite white men, as it gradually extended to…other white men. More
broad-minded sorts advocated for reforms that would make women equal partners
in society, and others still advocated for ending the practice of slavery and bringing
African-Americans into the American family, but these were largely voices in
the wilderness, voices that, especially on the issue of emancipation, became
stronger in the middle of the century.
Then another crisis that threatened the
existence of the Republic erupted in April, 1861 when the United States, now
split in two, went to war with itself. Though
the causes of the war are much-debated, there is little doubt in my mind that
the central issue was the southern fear that with the election of Lincoln,
slavery would be abolished. Some of the
ordinances of secession directly mention or allude to the practice and several
provisions of the Confederate constitution deal with it as well. Even if it was not the proximate cause of the
war, by the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, it was clear that on one
level the war was being fought for the freedom of African Americans. Though both sides used the language of the
Declaration in their writings, it is Lincoln who is generally credited with restoring
the document to American consciousness.
Most notably, of course, there is the opening "Four score and seven
years ago," to the Gettysburg address.
But the end of that speech needs to be considered as well:
that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
The war, in Lincoln's mind, had become
about reaffirming the core values of the new nation and insuring their
continuance. Part of this was the push
at the end of his life, when the outcome of the war and the emancipation of the
slaves was certain, to bring African-Americans into the civil life of America. This push culminated in the Reconstruction
amendments, which at least for the duration of Reconstruction, provided African
Americans in the south entry into political life.
This, I would suggest, is the true
beginning of the American orthodoxy, which holds that the promise implicit in
our founding documents should be extended to all citizens. It was born of the crisis of the Revolution
and re-forged in the crisis of the Civil War.
For following the Civil War, for a little more than a century, we see an
expansion of liberties for those who were excluded from full citizenship prior
to the Civil War. Expansion was uneven,
of course, and I would be remiss not to mention the tragedy of Jim Crow, the
racism of acts to exclude Asian immigrants, the treatment of native Americans, and
the very slow progression to suffrage for women. Indeed, the circumstances of progress and
regress are a central part of this argument.
Permit me, then, to jump ahead. Conceding that the political gains for
African-Americans, especially in the South, were ephemeral, we need to look at
the circumstances in which such gains were made. Emancipation came about as a result of the
existential threat of the Civil War, and the Reconstruction amendments that
theoretically guaranteed equality were a result of that. Why a decay in the years following
Reconstruction? Simply put, there was no
pressure to maintain the gains. In the
years that followed Reconstruction, there were few voices clamoring for African
American equality, for women's suffrage, because of a sense among the powerful
that things were good. Though women
would first be allowed to vote in the Wyoming territory in 1869, it was not
until 1920 that they would gain the national vote. And, of course, it was not until the 1950s
and 1960s that a real civil rights push for African Americans took hold,
culminating in the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act of the Johnson
administration.
I would like to suggest that these gains
were similar to the initial gains made by African Americans during and
immediately after the Civil War. Women
gained the right to vote, after decades of agitation, at least in part because
of their contributions on the home front during the First World War. African Americans gained greater civil rights
in part because of their service in the Second World War and Korea, by which
time fighting units had been desegregated, and in part because the denial of
such rights was a propaganda weapon that the Soviets could use during the Cold
War. In other words, when the United
States was faced with dire threats, more and more people who had been previously
excluded from the ranks of "We the people," were called into service
and, ultimately, brought into the ranks of full citizens.
This action, extension and refining of
our core tenets, is why I have chosen the term "American orthodoxy,"
so I will take the opportunity to offer an apology of sorts for the term. This is an apology in the sense of an
explanation, such as defenders of religion engage in when testifying to the
truth of their faith. Apology is doubly
appropriate since orthodoxy is itself a term most often applied to
religion. My usage will be
more…catholic. Orthodoxy ultimately derives from the Greek orthodoxos, meaning "proper belief." It is generally paired with heterodoxy, or
a "different belief." Someone
who has chosen heterodoxy, is a heretic, from the Greek for making a choice.
Orthodoxy need not be limited simply to
matters of religion. Indeed, we often
hear this language used for matters of politics, science, etc. In order to be orthodox, a belief need only
be widely accepted and, more importantly, advanced by entities with the power
to produce content that confirms the orthodox belief and to punish
dissenters. Orthodoxy is not, however,
fixed and immutable. It is constantly
challenged by heterodox ideas, generally from within. At each step along the way, orthodoxy is
changed by its encounter with heterodoxy, as its ideas and arguments are forced
to become sharper and better-defined.
Heterodox ideas, on the other hand, tend
to appear when the power that maintains orthodoxy, be it governmental authority
or social utility, is weak. Tenuous
gains by African Americans immediately after the Civil War faded because the
only force capable of imposing American orthodoxy, the federal government—more
specifically, the occupying Union armies—fled the scene. It was,
again, only when there was a significant outside threat that there was enough
momentum to bring women, then later African Americans, on board. Of course, this is not to say that there was
no dissent in the interim. But as long
as there was no looming menace that favored women and African Americans
becoming full members of the American family, their protests could be ignored
and suppressed as heretical. On the
other hand whenever there was a perceived need for unity, expansion of rights,
the mark of inclusion, would be favored.
There are deep drivers at work
here. A factor we haven't mentioned in
this discussion, for instance, is urbanization.
Throughout the late 19th century, the United States underwent a massive
migration from the countryside into the cities.
A result of this migration has been a shift in mores, which in rural
life most likely encouraged obedience to authority and group cohesion (think of
Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind
and the values he claims political conservatives are more attuned to than
political liberals), to those more concerned with fairness and equity as people
from different places and diverse religious backgrounds mixed. Anything that tends to build barriers would
tend to be de-emphasized. This is a
breakdown of what we might loosely call tribal values in favor of more
cosmopolitan ones; it may be the substrate on which the edifice of rights we
have discussed were later built. If so,
then we can explain the extension of rights as a literal extension of "we
the people," as a way of increasing membership in the tribe when
confronted by a larger tribe.
It also goes a long way towards
explaining why the American orthodoxy is unraveling at this historical
moment. At the beginning, I suggested
that this unraveling began in the 1970s by the groups that joined to form the
Reagan coalition. This movement was born
of discontent with the civil rights advances of the 1960s, of anti-communists
and of religious conservatives. The
orthodoxy that saw, among other things, the imposition of the Voting Rights Act
on the South and the Roe decision in
1973, began to be challenged with increasing effectiveness. This could happen because after more than
half a century of living under dire threat, the United States entered a period
culminating with the demise of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s and its
emergence, at least briefly, as the sole superpower. This moment seems to have started with the
policy of détente, which eased
superpower tensions under President Nixon, an easing that survived President
Reagan's attempts to revive the full-blown Cold War.
Absent an existential threat, tribal identities—white, Protestant, conservative, what-have-you—could once again be
asserted over the more cosmopolitan values that had created the American
orthodoxy. National power, power that
was exerted in creating this orthodoxy and that was needed in the crises of the
20th century, began to give way once again to state power, itself more
susceptible to manipulation in favor of tribal values. This is clearly evident in the movements in
Republican-led statehouses to clamp down on abortion, to raise new barriers to
voting, and even in the short-lived attempt in the North Carolina General
Assembly to make local establishments of religion legal—secularism, too, was a
component of the American orthodoxy.
Only, it seems, in the face of an existential threat can the emergent
tribal values be laid aside in favor of a more cosmopolitan outlook. Witness, for instance, the groundswell of
unity in the weeks following the September 11, 2001 attacks, a unity that
quickly faded when the shape of the threat became clear and when President Bush
and Republicans began using the attacks as a bludgeon against dissent. Finally, it is no coincidence that this
process accelerated following the election of President Obama. Overtly racist or not, there certainly seems
to be a sense in some quarters that the president is "not one of us,"
a sense evident in accusations that the president was born in Kenya, or is a
crypto-Muslim.
What is to be done? President Reagan once said , "I
occasionally think how quickly our differences, worldwide, would vanish if we
were facing an alien threat from outside this world." He seems to have instinctively understood
that small differences disappear when confronted with a larger threat. While that would almost certainly work, or
aggressive moves by a rising power like China might ease our internal tensions,
the former seems at best unlikely and the latter certainly undesirable.
One concomitant of the emergence of
tribal values is the emergence of tribal religion, what we might call a
heterodoxy to the inclusiveness of the American orthodoxy. It's no coincidence that most of the movers
in both the pushback against abortion rights and the implementation of new
voting measures are evangelical Protestants.
Their values tend to be rooted as much in the legalism of the Old
Testament as in the dispensation of the New.
There is an emphasis placed on rules, rules which it should be noted
were originally written by Hebrews for Hebrews, which is to say to protect
members of the in-group against pollution from without and within (again we see
the usefulness of Haidt's model in The
Righteous Mind). On top of this is
what seems in some groups a genuine push to redeem society, but according to
the rules of the given sect. The study
of nature, and of the evolution of groups, tells us that those groups with a
high level of cohesiveness tend to out-compete less cohesive groups, so there
is genuine cause for concern.
What is needed, then, is something
capable of drawing diverse people together, and of providing them with a high
degree of cohesion. We need institutions
that encourage the cosmopolitan values that have served us well and which could
again. While the groups currently
unraveling the American orthodoxy are numerous, I cannot imagine that they
outnumber those who would rather not
see it undone. Who are in these
groups? Catholics (mostly, though
abortion can be problematic), non-believers of various stripes, Jews, African
Americans (except occasionally on gay rights and environmental issues). Mainline Protestants might be convinced, as
they are not quite so rigidly partisan as Evangelical Protestants tend to be. Anyone who values secular society—by which I
mean a society and government that is officially neutral on matters of
religion—the only true guarantor of religious freedom. Humanists, who recognize the dangers inherent
in devaluing people in the here and now.
People who have an expansive view of "we the people," one that
includes those who have historically been marginalized, and one that extends
beyond confessional borders. In other
words, the same people who saw to it that the American orthodoxy came into
existence in the first place.
Failure to act, to restore this promise,
is unacceptable. In the contest between
orthodoxy and heterodoxy, both sides are generally convinced they are in the
right. And, in the final analysis, one
is, if only by virtue of victory. It is
up to us to decide which it will be.
