Alabama — Creating the Theocracy
Democracy and compromise are tied to the tracks. The train is coming.
Judges, teachers, and clergy make up the predominant moral authorities in our lives. They have the most power to change the course of our lives. Closer to home, there are other sources — parents, siblings, friends — who also lay claim to the authority to influence and shape us, but we’re freer to reject what they say. In fact, with parents, it seems to be a rite of passage that we do reject their “wisdom”, proving to them and to ourselves that we know ourselves better than they possibly could.
The Supreme Court of Alabama believes they are judges, teachers, and clergy rolled into one. The sad details are below.
Those with more authority over us can tell us what to do and can enforce their decisions. A judge can with a guilty or not guilty verdict or with a pronouncement on constitutionality change the direction and fortune of someone’s life. Teachers, if they’re good at their jobs, can open up an unsuspected view of the world that inspires a reassessment. If the teacher is also a tester, as most are, then they can also gatekeep someone’s access to a particular future. Clergy have fewer means to enforce their beliefs, but if they catch you early enough in your formant years, they can drum into your psyche the wondrous prospects of heaven or the brutalities of hell and so guide or coerce your behavior.
All the pronouncements of these authority figures come stamped with claims of scientific, social or moral truth and the wherewithal to open or close the gates into various communities and associations. Being admitted into groups, like ivy league schools, churches, guilds, social media sites, and doctor’s offices comes with the promise of companionship, fraternity, career advancement, health and heaven. Being denied admittance comes with the threat of loneliness, career failure, prison, disease and hell.
The choice is yours, as they say, but is it really? What is the basis a person facing a divide in the road feels is necessary to reliably choose one path versus the other? What if the signage on one or the other of the alternatives is wrong? What if the people who put up the signs have lied?
Heather Cox Richardson, a people’s historian, enthusiastically on the side of democracy, raises the possibility that another class of would-be authority figures, our politicians, may be acting for their personal advantage, rather than their constituents. In fact they may be lying to you, and lying a lot.
She writes in Democracy Awakening:
Once people internalize their leader’s propaganda, it doesn’t matter when pieces of it are proven to be lies, because [the propaganda] has become central to their identity.
That is to say, the lies become accepted as truth and dislodging them becomes near hopeless.
I suspect you know where this is leading — directly to America’s hyper polarized political environment where the liars for the Democrats are the Republicans and the liars for the Republicans are the Democrats.
I’m a socialist in principle, though it is not a viable political option in America. Since socialism is demonized by Republicans, but is tolerated by some Democrats, I vote Democratic as a proxy. I have infused so much of the Democratic party line that I’m in agreement with most of its positions. As a corollary I reject much of the Republican rationales for their policy positions. And since I read leftist media primarily, I believe that Republicans are lying a lot about Democrats.
I do on the other hand believe just as strongly that Republicans voters are sincere about their own beliefs. My claim, though, would be that those poor, benighted souls have been lied to.
Okay, okay, enough. Maybe I’ve fallen into that group of Richardson’s hyper propagandized people who can’t be convinced of the other side’s stance. Maybe I lack discernment and resist the truth evident if only I would see. Actually, I think that’s partly true, since I’m willing to overlook or willfully ignore the mistakes that my side makes. Take, for instance, the push my side made for NAFTA in 1992, not understanding or ignoring the carnage it would cause to the industrial Midwest, now better known as the rust belt. Detroit is my home town and I’m angry about Democrats’ complicity in throwing it under the bus.
But I’m not writing this to reignite the charcoal. What I want to consider is how to lessen the polarization, not to change someone’s political mind. How do we get back to the spirit of compromise? By spirit of compromise, I don’t mean finding some wishy-washy middle way towards positions that nobody is happy with. I don’t want to surrender my strongly held beliefs for what I feel are mediocre ways to govern.
For instance, I don’t like the compromises that involve finding some length of pregnancy beyond which a woman cannot legally have an abortion — 6 weeks, 12 weeks, 16 weeks. The right answer for me is to defer to the pregnant woman’s own scientific, social and moral truth, however she has come to embrace that truth. I know I’m not going to win that particular argument in the lifespan I still have left, so the question is how to compromise toward the best possible solution. I don’t have that answer though, so let me talk next in generalities.
The spirit of compromise means being willing to tolerate the moral and scientific positions by which other people reach their truths. The present U.S. Supreme Court and the Alabama Supreme Court are examples of how not to do that.
The Oklahoma Supreme Court recently declared that a fertilized human egg is a person, largely tacking their decision onto the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent Dobbs decision retracting fifty years of women’s Constitutional right to abortion. The Alabama decision cast a wider net for other reproductive rights by extrapolating on the Dobbs decision. It established that fertilized eggs are persons, which essentially criminalizes the practice of in vitro fertilization. IVF is a popular approach for people to bear children whose biology or circumstances make it impossible to have them through sexual intercourse.
The Alabama justices think that their moral justification for denying would-be parents this right is more solid than yours or mine. More holier than thou. That’s arrogant and callous, and not at all in the spirit of compromising.
The people who disagree with the court’s reasoning may rightfully feel that their own morality is being devalued and that acting on their own moral foundation is being criminalized. Let’s say these righteous people who have now been declared as morally deficient derive their morals from science and the golden rule, rather than religious doctrine.
Science can’t definitively pronounce on an untestable claim, like whether there is such a thing as a soul and, if there is, when it gets embodied, It can’t tell you that the Court’s claim is true or false. It is unknowable. To claim that it is true does an injustice to the people whose truth is secularly based.
To these people, me being one, the decision rests on a vacuous claim. It violates the spirit of compromise and is fated to create yet more tension in the country. And God in heaven knows we don’t need more of that. It is the equivalent of the Prohibition amendment to the Constitution that created a black market in alcohol, a criminal underclass, and poisonings from bathtub gin. Prohibition was a mistake and it was corrected by a repeal of the amendment thirteen years later.
My position here is that the Alabama court had no moral authority to issue that kind of ruling in a Constitutional democracy such as we claim to live in. They based it on a belief stemming from religious teaching, something that our Constitution has rejected as a consideration for governing and adjudicating. The court has no standing to issue a religious opinion. In doing so, it treads on the moral foundations of some significant segment of the population, effectively telling them that they are evil and that they are now subject to criminal penalties if they act on their beliefs.
If the justices thought that this decision was going to convince people to change their minds, they should guess again. Their religious proselytizing won’t be any more successful than will my convincing them that they’re wrong. That what they are doing is destructive to the cohesiveness of the country, that they are being autocratic and dictatorial, and that they have jeopardized their judicial integrity. And most definitely it will not convince me to become a card carrying creationist. I will become even more locked into my own silo.
Respecting and acting in a spirit of compromise, they would have realized that their decision was going to be divisive. If that was their intention, which seems likely, they should not be judges, they should leave the bench and go preach from their own fundamentalist pulpits. Or they should advocate for a Constitutional amendment, which if ratified, I bet would have a similar lifespan as the Prohibition amendment had after it brought about years of needless social drama.
The spirit of compromise would say if you believe your fertilized eggs have souls, okay, we respect that, go ahead and live your life accordingly. But if you believe your fertilized eggs don’t have souls, we respect that too, go ahead and live your life accordingly.
An afterword: It’s getting clearer all the time that Republicans actually do see the Constitution as an impediment to getting their way. A speaker at this month’s Conservative Political Action Conference had this to say in his opening remarks:
“Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on Jan. 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it.”
— Jack Posobiec
How long before this attitude gets locked into the Republican platform and we face an inevitable divorce?
