Thread by @jeffblack945

#RevThread #130
“ . . . Thy Liberty in Law”

1/ The second stanza of “America the Beautiful” ends with this complex exhortation: “Confirm thy soul in self-control, Thy liberty in law!”

2/ When the professor and poet Kathleen Bates went to Colorado Springs and climbed Pikes Peak and saw the grandeur of it all, the lyrics of “America the Beautiful” came to her. Major inspiration.

3/ Let's meditate a bit on confirming liberty in law.

4/ Mom and Dad set rules. We’re told we’re good when we follow the rules and bad when we defy their rules. It’s nice when Mom and Dad are smiling at us. But it’s delicious when we figure out how to break their rules and not get caught.

5/ Hmmm. Then too, come to think of it, it’s no fun when brothers or sisters try making the law. We all say, “You’re not the boss of me!”...

6/... “When I was a child,” as Paul put it (1 Cor. 13:11), “I thought like a child.”
I thought freedom meant being able to break rules when I wanted to.

7/ And then we get older and begin to perceive two big things:
The first is that when I was continually enjoying the fun of being a brat, I got into a disapproved circle, the wrong gang.

8/ The second is that Mom and Dad did not have it all together. Some of their rules don’t work real well….like, “we never talk about Dad’s drinking”. Not a great rule. "Wait a minute-Dad has problems?" Then it would be time for, as Bill Maher likes to say, “New Rules!”

9/ Hence, legislatures.

10/ Deep law -- the Torah, the Constitution -- lasts a long, long time. Deep law deals with the structure of law itself, and governs how and when laws need to change.

11/ Let’s go back to how our sense of right & wrong derives from our experience of growing up. Sooner or later, our rule-breaking, while fun when we get away with it, hurts somebody - either ourselves or another family member. And so we begin to mature - at least, most of us do.

12/ I served an apprenticeship as a chaplain in a reformatory. Most of the inmates were, in Shakespeare’s phrase, “more sinned against than sinning”--chaotic families, etc., etc.

13/ But one or two had not yet gotten that stealing or assaulting actually hurts people. Their problem, they thought, was just having been caught.

14/ They were still lawless. And therefore they were not yet able to be free.

15/ My friend Nicky Gumbel tells the story of when he had taken his son to a soccer match & the referee had not showed up. Since Nicky was the only dad around, the kids & the moms pressed him into being the referee, even though he didn’t know much about the game or the rules...

16/... Within a few minutes there were quarrels breaking out and kids getting hurt because Nicky couldn’t adjudicate their arguments about fouls, and didn’t know how to set up the boundaries or when to whistle a stop to the play. So chaos ensued.

17/ Then the real referee did show up, reset the boundaries, settled the disputed calls, knew when to blow the whistle, and the kids had a great game. Nicky asked, “When were they free? When I was the referee, or when the rules were clear and fairly upheld?

18/ In our system of Democracy -- that is, in the deep law that governs the way laws can be introduced or cancelled -- the President is the person charged with making sure the laws the legislature generates are implemented,

19...and the Legislature is charged with overseeing the actions of the Executive Branch.

20/ What happens when the president himself is a lawless person, someone who never matured, someone who has spent his life defying the law and never experiencing the consequences of his theft and his dishonesty?

21/ Someone whose self-control is so weak he brags of being a p***y-grabber? Someone whose parents’ endless wealth shielded him from the consequences of his lawlessness? Someone whose whole life has been about exploiting and discarding friends and family members?

22/ We’re finding out, aren’t we? What is it that makes America Beautiful? Some thought America was great when power, prestige, position and privilege were reserved for wealthy white males. That’s still the current GOP version of America the Beautiful.

23/ But when the chief executive in charge of seeing that our laws are faithfully enforced is himself lawless, and when his party fully embraces him, we become a more autocratic country by the month.

24/ Professor Bates, in her mountaintop moment, had a better vision. Personally, it’s better for democracy to have citizens whose souls are confirmed in self-control. Politically, it’s better for all of us to have our liberty confirmed by law.

25/ So let’s take the legal option in front of us, overcome the malign influence of oligarchs foreign and domestic, vote this man and his corrupted GOP out of power, and then affirm the law by bringing this wretch before the bar of justice.

26/ If we can impeach him now, so much the better. But either by impeachment or by the ballot box, we need to assert once again that America is justly beautiful only when her liberty is enshrined in laws derived from and affirmed by the people.