Too many people these days falsely believe that the United States Constitution is all about individual rights, such as freedom of speech, the right to own a gun, and the right to have an abortion.
They forget about "promote the general welfare" in the preamble to the Constitution.
Yesterday I read a great opinion piece by Paul VanDevelder in the Portland Oregonian: "Too many willing soldiers in the culture war." (In case that link stops working, I'll include the essay in an addendum to this post.)
My favorite part of the piece is a description of what happened when a couple of right-wingers, Kevin Mannix (an attorney) and Bill Sizemore (convicted racketeer) challenged the constitutionality of a proposed ballot initiative before the state Supreme Court.
We all rose as the seven judges filed into the courtroom and took their seats. Chief Justice Michael Gillette, a conservative Harvard-educated jurist with a deliberate manner and a short fuse, didn't dilly-dally. He gave a brief oral summary of the initiative in a stentorian voice, then asked Mannix to explain his protest.
Mannix, no stranger to the court, cut to the chase. He told the court that Section 8 of the initiative, which read, "In an equal contest between the rights of an individual and the welfare of the community, the welfare of the community is usually superior," was simply un-American. By subordinating the liberties of individuals to the well-being of the community, this concept, charged Mannix, violated every principle of freedom our nation stands for, and voters needed to understand what was at stake.
Mannix thrust his chin into the air. After an interval of electric silence, the chief justice rocked forward on his elbows and bellowed, "That principle, Mr. Mannix, lies at the heart of American foundational law! When was the last time you read the U.S. Constitution? Exactly what is your problem with our Constitution, Mr. Mannix?"
In one brief statement, Justice Gillette had measured the ground we have lost since James Madison and Alexander Hamilton set out to illuminate and safeguard the precarious balance that exists in a representative democracy between the rights of the individual and the welfare of the community.
I thought of these sentiments when I came across a story about how lawmakers in some states are trying to amend their constitutions to outlaw a requirement that everyone have health insurance.
(I assume next they will try to outlaw mandatory auto insurance for drivers.)
This requirement likely will be part of whatever national health insurance reform bill is passed by Congress. It's necessary to make our mediocre health care system better than Costa Rica's.
One reason, among several, is that if some people are able to opt out of health insurance, the rest of us are going to end up paying their bills when they end up in the emergency room after they get sick and need subsidized charity care.
But the individual right'ists don't care about the general welfare of this country. They're selfishly focused on me, me, me -- allowing a few people to gain benefits at the expense of the many.
VanDevelder goes to say that the Oregon Supreme Court voted 7-0 against the notion that individuals rights and freedoms should be allowed to triumph over the larger common good.
Hopefully Kevin Mannix used this as a teachable moment to learn about the United States Constitution (which you'd think he'd have been exposed to in law school; maybe he slept through those classes).
Here's the essay.
Public civility: Too many willing soldiers in the culture war
by Paul VanDevelder
(Essay in Portland Oregonian, September 27, 2009)
Those of us who dare to haul our egos and ambitions across the stage of public life in the ersatz "service" of our fellows are seldom rewarded with "burning bush" epiphanies.
I was lucky enough to experience one of those rare epiphanies a few years ago, when future Oregon Senate President Peter Courtney, Lane County Commissioner Pete Sorenson and I got together to write the Oregon Human Rights Initiative. The idea behind this was simple. Public civility was fast becoming an endangered medium of exchange in American society. We wanted to do something to head off a full-blown culture war right here in Oregon.The principles laid out in the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights seemed like a great place to start. It was conceived and written by Eleanor Roosevelt in the days after World War II. The New York Times has called the document "one of the most important political legacies of the 20th century." We agreed, and thought it also served as a fine framework for our initiative, which we hoped to qualify for the 2000 statewide ballot.
Underfunded and understaffed, we launched our campaign for civil public discourse and waited for the inevitable reaction. We didn't have long to wait. To listen to Republicans and their allies, you would have thought we were promoting a Bolshevik revolution. Sure, we knew Oregon had its share of loose cannons but, wow, the fervor surprised us.
"Socialistic tripe," fumed Jack Roberts, the state's labor commissioner at the time. Kevin Mannix, a state representative who would run for governor two years later, wrote that principles expressed in our initiative were "contrary to the spirit of most of our laws and the whole philosophy of our form of government." Mannix and his unlikely bedfellow, initiative promoter Bill Sizemore, appealed to the Oregon Supreme Court to prevent these dangerous ideas from entering the public arena. As we walked toward the courthouse on that gloomy December morning, you could almost hear the carpenter's hammers building the hangman's scaffolds on the steps of the statehouse.
We all rose as the seven judges filed into the courtroom and took their seats. Chief Justice Michael Gillette, a conservative Harvard-educated jurist with a deliberate manner and a short fuse, didn't dilly-dally. He gave a brief oral summary of the initiative in a stentorian voice, then asked Mannix to explain his protest.
Mannix, no stranger to the court, cut to the chase. He told the court that Section 8 of the initiative, which read, "In an equal contest between the rights of an individual and the welfare of the community, the welfare of the community is usually superior," was simply un-American. By subordinating the liberties of individuals to the well-being of the community, this concept, charged Mannix, violated every principle of freedom our nation stands for, and voters needed to understand what was at stake.
Mannix thrust his chin into the air. After an interval of electric silence, the chief justice rocked forward on his elbows and bellowed, "That principle, Mr. Mannix, lies at the heart of American foundational law! When was the last time you read the U.S. Constitution? Exactly what is your problem with our Constitution, Mr. Mannix?"
In one brief statement, Justice Gillette had measured the ground we have lost since James Madison and Alexander Hamilton set out to illuminate and safeguard the precarious balance that exists in a representative democracy between the rights of the individual and the welfare of the community.
Gillette's rhetorical question bemoaned the ascendance of ignorance's principal victim: political possibility underwritten by civic discourse. Or, to paraphrase Mr. Madison -- no democracy can survive the ideological storms brewed up by a rascal citizenry when individual rights and freedoms are allowed to triumph over the larger common good. The court agreed. We won that battle, 7-0. And though a lack of monies, time and manpower brought us up short of our ultimate goal -- a measure on the 2000 ballot -- this was an important victory.
A decade later we find ourselves mired in a culture war more strident than any we could have imagined. As the vitriol of public discourse becomes more poisonous by the day, we are left to ask, how did so many Americans miss this civics lesson? Tangentially, what price do we pay as a society for this collective regression to lower forms of order? More disturbing yet, how is it that we have spent more money on education than any other nation in the world and have so little to show for it?
This question has been troubling the folks at the nonpartisan Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and they think they're closing in on some very unsettling answers. Last year, ISI administered a "civics literacy" exam to 2,500 college graduates and elected politicians nationwide. The 33-question test was based on the same questions asked of people applying for American citizenship. Seventeen hundred, roughly 70 percent, flunked. The average grade among those who failed was 49 percent, not even close to a passing grade. The group that fared the worst, at 44 percent, were elected politicians.
The institute reported that most who took the test did not know who was responsible for declaring war -- the president or Congress. Most, in fact, could not name the three branches of government. Can this come as a surprise when the GOP's candidate for governor in Oregon doesn't even know that the rights and welfare of the community are usually superior to those of the individual? (If you don't believe this, try explaining to a judge why you can run a stop light with impunity.) More to the point, how do we sustain and safeguard a representative democracy when it is assaulted from every side by the tyranny of individualism and corporatism?
With "culture war" rhetoric diminishing the standards of public civility with each news cycle, the results of ISI's study should give us pause. It's deeply disquieting to realize that 70 percent of us with college diplomas can't even get the basic principles of democracy half right. At what point on that slippery slope do we cease to be a government of the people, by the people and for the people, and become a nation of the blind leading the blind?
Paul VanDevelder of Corvallis is the author of "Coyote Warrior: One Man, Three Tribes, and the Trial that Forged a Nation" and "Savages and Scoundrels: The Untold Story of America's Road to Empire through Indian Territory."
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