This morning I unpacked my latest cell phone and tried to turn it on. And tried and tried. To no avail! I pushed every likely button in hopes of getting power up. I even read the summary sheet for start-up. It was cryptic and unhelpful. Finally I called the 800 help line, and a velvet-voiced woman on the other end took me step-by-step through the empowerment process. She never once said, “Why didn’t you read the instruction manual?” But it was the subtext to the whole encounter, during which my inner voice was screaming “Ignorant Luddite,” or more insulting contemporary equivalents. Now that I’ve begun to read the instruction book I find the phone is capable of all sorts of things—that it has a built-in speaker-phone capability and that it will respond to voice commands (as opposed to my young children, who often will not!).
Like so much of the news media-addicted populace I’ve been bombarded by the Roy Moore/Ten Commandment monument saga. It’s gone from the story of a crusty judge who insisted on posting a copy of the Bible Ten in his courtroom, where most of the transient guests should have read them long before their appearance, on to the much “heavier” scene of praying faithful, some prostrate before the two-ton granite version of the Ten, being dragged off by authorities. And I must say the scene is at first distressing to any Christian. It easily translates into a call to action, to a deep throaty roar of “Crusade”—against secular humanists and other infidels, of course—and prayers for regime change in the courts.
But after the TV tube had faded to black, sometime after bundling the newspaper into the trash with the other disposables of life, my righteous indignation began to subside. Especially after it hit me that the good judge seems intent on posting a dangerously truncated version of the biblical Ten Commandments (in fact, the Bible is pretty severe in its condemnation of those who would add to or take away from the words of Scripture). As a Seventh-day Adventist I am troubled to see the full text of the fourth commandment redacted to “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.” Read the full text, including “six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: but the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God,” and the case for a Saturday Sabbath begins to take on a biblical imperative.
It has become painfully apparent that the good judge Moore is intent on thumbing his nose at the law. However, he is enabled in this by people who do not know or only know part of the law. They demand unbridled religious “freedom” to flaunt these icons of a particular faith, and fail to recognize the legal prohibition on the state to promote any version of faith. The First Amendment is, after all, a bar to state religion (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”) as well as a guarantee of religious expression (“or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”). I know that most of Moore’s supporters would howl with indignation if a Buddhist judge were to enshrine the Buddha’s teachings on stone at the courthouse—and their justification that this is a Christian country is both wrongheaded and wrong law. It depends for its power on uniformed opinion—if people read more history, knew more of the Constitution itself, rather than what is said about both, the argument in this and other equally contentious issues might simply not be there.
This tendency toward relying on executive summary is an unfortunate fact of life in a modern society that spawns information faster than a computer virus. It might have taken root, as it did with me, during school days when Cliff Notes and other summaries were an easy entrée to comprehending the incomprehensible. And the habit plays itself out in the success of insider summary newsletters and the disquieting revelation that the barest legal summaries, read or unread by a governor, might determine a death-row inmate’s fate. But can we thus summarize and simplify the particulars of the system of laws and the principles that define our very freedoms? I think not!
I was much taken with a recent Forum feature in USA Today by Tony Mauro, a Supreme Court correspondent. He told of the very interesting project of civics teacher Randy Wright and his students at Liberty Middle School in Hanover, Virginia. They have been trying to convince Congress and the Treasury Department to redesign the $1 bill to feature the preamble to the Constitution and a summary of the Constitution itself. The idea has wings—since 1998, Congress has introduced bills, hearings have been held, and public service ads touting the idea have been well received—but has yet to take off. It’s a great idea, but deeply flawed if real knowledge of the Constitution is the ultimate aim.
Tony remarks by way of a truism that most Americans have only the vaguest idea of what the Constitution contains. After election 2000 it became apparent that many people think we are a pure democracy rather than a democratic representative republic—and their misapprehension can only be heightened by the goings-on in California!! And how can we interpret the many security-at any-cost-no matter-how-much-freedom-we-have-to-give-up call-in comments to talk radio other than an application of the most superficial knowledge of the Constitution?
In fact, the summary of the Constitution these bright-eyed student optimists would put on the dollar might itself cause further devaluation of its content. Take the Fourteenth Amendment: it would read “Defines citizenship.” No better than the fourth Commandment summary to its reality, and scarcely any way to prepare someone to cry foul at the idea of removing citizenship rights at the outset of government charge and detainment! That sort of constitutional Cliff Note summary can only demean our freedoms.
There can be no substitute for an informed citizenry to guarantee freedom’s continuance. We can only hope for the best in countries like Iraq, where good faith efforts are made to implant democracy for the good of the populace. But the facts of history in the democratic West are clear: it is detailed knowledge of the specifics of freedom and what it embodies that enables its continuance. And while we can resurrect the old debate of just how religious principles have shaped English and now American common law as its continuance, it is indeed the culturally inculcated principles and knowledge that best define and protect. God help us if the present amnesia on constitutional and freedom principles is not just bad memory but of a deeper and more Alzheimic nature.
In the meantime we seem limited to our notes and executive summaries, hoping that someone else does not redefine as they redact for us. Perhaps that’s why I was so taken by the point that Tony Mauro made toward the end of his essay.
“The Constitution, in short, does not lend itself to easy rendition on the back of a dollar bill. . . . Why not print the text of the First Amendment, pure and simple? ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.’
“The First Amendment, more than any other part of the Constitution, defines what is unique about America. The late Supreme Court justice William Brennan, Jr., once told columnist Nat Hentoff that the First Amendment was his favorite part of the Constitution. ‘All other liberties and rights flow from the freedom to speak up,’ Brennan said. ‘Its enforcement gives us this society. The other provisions of the Constitution merely embellish it.’”
A good executive summary: we must protect the right to speak up and the right to speak Up.
Lincoln E. Steed
Editor,
Liberty Magazine
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