45 Words and the Sidewalk

Last summer “Blowin’ in the Wind” went on a road trip around the US.  This summer we intend to spend some weeks traveling on the “road map” of US civil liberties, the First Amendment to the Constitution. It’s only 45 words long, but its “Five Freedoms” determine very many key and contentious Supreme Court decisions.  This past week the court ruled on free speech and abortion protestors.  By next week we should have heard their decision on the infamous “Hobby Lobby” case on religious freedom and contraception.  (So many of our court rulings are about women’s reproductive choices.)  So hop on board this summer’s First Amendment express!

Can you name the “five freedoms” that are asserted and protected in the First Amendment to the US Constitution?  Almost 1/3 (29%) of all Americans cannot name even one.

That sad statistic and lots of other info about the First Amendment I learned from The First Amendment Center, based at Vanderbilt University. Interesting time lines, lesson plans for all ages, reviews of famous cases.  And an annual State of the First Amendment Survey. 

The Center was all excited this year because in their survey the largest number of Americans ever (68%) could actually remember one freedom protected in the First Amendment – freedom of speech!  And another highest number of the surveyed ever (29%!) could name another freedom – religion.  But only 14% remembered our cherished freedom of the press.

And putting aside my cynical superiority for a moment, I too had trouble remembering the last two. With a few hints from my daughter the high school American history teacher I remembered the right to assembly.  But like 99% of Americans, I had no memory of the freedom to petition the government.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free expression thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

That’s it. It was the first of ten amendments, called the Bill of Rights, which James Madison wrote in 1791, two years after the US Constitution had been ratified.  He hoped to reduce the fears some people had, that the new government had too much power, by spelling out more explicitly the rights of individual citizens in this new land.

223 years later we are still debating the meaning of freedom of speech, to take just one of the five freedoms, albeit the one most Americans can remember.  This past week the Supreme Court issued a rare unanimous decision, ruling that a Massachusetts law, setting up at 35-foot buffer zone around the entrance to abortion clinics, violated the First Amendment free speech rights of abortion opponents.

I am no constitutional law expert, but I do know that headlines can be too simplistically deceiving; “Abortion protest buffer zones unanimously rejected by court.”   

The real juice is in the full text, how each justice argues and sometimes dissents.  I am relying on the analysis of the New York Times and Emily Bazelon, the legal correspondent for Slate Magazine, for my few comments.

At first it was surprising to read that proud liberals like Sonya Sotomayor and staunch conservatives like Clarence Thomas agreed on a ruling about abortion.  But it was actually a ruling about free speech.  They all said abortion opponents should be able to stand on a public sidewalk and exercise their free speech rights. 

There gave two reasons against the buffer zones.  One, because some of the abortion opponents, including the plaintiff in this case, are there on public space not to yell at the clinic clients or berate them, but, they say, to walk and speak with them about alternatives to abortion.

And two, the justices said, there are other laws against intimidation and harassment and obstruction that clinics can still use to control unruly protestors.  They also hinted that they might accept a smaller buffer zone, like the 10 foot one in California, which does not extend out to the public space of the sidewalk.

Remember last year when Chief Justice Roberts surprised us all by siding with the liberals and upheld Obamacare?  He did a similar surprise switch from type this time, siding with the three women justices and the other liberal Stephen Breyer.  Those five wrote a nuanced and not absolute ruling, with the hint they would accept smaller zones, and suggesting other ways to limit protestors.  The other four justices, on the other hand, were more extreme, ruling out any buffer zones: "Protecting people from speech they do not want to hear is not a function that the First Amendment allows the government to undertake in the public streets and sidewalks," wrote Justice Scalia. Together the nine rejecting the Massachusetts law, but Roberts siding with the liberals made it a more narrow ruling.

Progressives like MSNBC host Rachel Maddow predictably condemned the ruling and pointed out the hypocrisy that the Supreme Court itself has a large buffer zone against protests around its own building, as if their private entrance and armed guards weren't enough protection.

"Free speech isn't free," is a commonly seen protest sign outside the court, usually held by conservatives. Meaning, I think, that the right free speech comes with a cost. Like hearing things you don't want to hear.

In our increasingly polarized and nasty nation, I expect we'll be hearing a lot we don't want to hear, most freely.

Copyright © 2014 Deborah Streeter

It’s Never Not Complicated, but There’s Always a Choice

Indulge me in a little more reflection from my recent European travel pilgrimage, this week about what we read while on a trip.  I treasure the ways I learn so much about my own nation, and my own self, when I am in other countries.  

I was trying to be a pilgrim on this trip, not a tourist, so I traveled light and tried to stay open to surprises.  That meant I did not plan ahead what books to take, even on my IPad. I pick up novels in airports and train stations and left them behind in hotel rooms.

I learned from my mother, who took Anthony Trollope to read on a safari in Kenya, how much fun it is to spend evenings reading about a totally different world than you’ve seen all day.  On this trip I found on a discount shelf outside a bookstore in Bloomsbury a good Colm Toibin novel about family and forgiveness in Ireland.  When I went inside to pay my one pound I discovered it was a socialist bookstore, and I spent an interesting half hour there learning about radical politics in London.  Thanks, literature, for opening more doors.  (I left that novel in my hotel room in Reims after the nice young staff guy there asked if I was leaving behind any travel brochures in English so he could work on his language skills; I hope he enjoyed it.)

But I did lug John Irving’s 839 page novel, Until I Find You, from the Aachen train, station (great selection of books in English) through Belgium and France, on my back along the Camino from Sermizelle to Vezelay, and finished it over the Atlantic.  The popular and praised American author of The World According to Garp, Prayer for Owen Meany, Hotel New Hampshire, Cider House Rules, and many other novels, Irving took me on a parallel trip through – again!? – family and forgiveness, helping me laugh and cry and think about America.

Big novel, big story about Jack Burns, begins as the 3 year old son of single mother tattoo artist.  Follows him through his odd and sort of kinky coming of age in New England, growing up to be a successful Hollywood actor and screenwriter, always seeking and finally finding his lost and mysterious father. 

Jack’s mother sends him off at age ten to a rigid all boys school in rural Maine, for reasons only explained much later in the book, and she has his teacher Mr. Ramsey drive Jack there.  They stop to get gas in the small town near the school.

It was the sort of rural gas station that sold groceries – mostly chips and soda, cigarettes and beer.  A blind dog was panting near the cash register, behind which a hefty woman sat on a stool…

“Seems a shame to send a boy away to school before he’s even shaving,” she said, nodding in Jack’s direction. 

“Well,” Mr. Ramsey replied, “there are many difficult circumstances that families find themselves in these days.  There’s not always a choice.”   “There’s always a choice,” the woman said stubbornly.  She reached under the cash register and brought out a handgun, which she placed on the counter.

“For example,” she continued, “I could blow my brains out, hoping someone would find the dog in the morning - not that anyone would take care of a blind dog.  It might be better to shoot the dog first, then blow my brains out.  What I’m saying is, it’s never not complicated – but there’s always a choice.”

Lots of ways to read this scene as being so very American.  Our nation has millions of hefty rural women and men with concealed handguns.  We love to tell other people they are bad parents and we often mock the children of others.

But this woman is also very unlike most Americans.  When it come to complications, we’re pretty stupid.  We think in black and white terms.  We oversimplify, either/or, not much nuance.  We assume there’s only one solution to most problems.  “Mission Accomplished.”  Live free or die.  My country right or wrong.  If you’re not a maker, you’re a taker. If you’re not with us, you’re against us.  Part of the solution or part of the problem.  All life begins at conception.  This is the only way God defines marriage.  American exceptionalism.  I’m the decider.  We are sure they will welcome us as liberators.

But rural gas station woman knows there are never no complications.  Even that phrasing is complex; Irving could have had her say, “It’s always complicated.”  But she says, “It’s never not complicated.”  I might want to end my life, but what about my blind dog?

She tells our hero and his teacher that they have choices.  Might not seem like much, when to shoot the gun.  But it’s a choice.

Irving writes some very funny scenes in Hollywood, and one can only imagine that he is drawing on his own experience writing the screenplay for Cider House Rules and winning the Oscar that year.  Maybe he too, like Jack, had a hilarious encounter with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the men’s room while holding his new gold statuette.

Only near the end of the book does Jack realize he has some choices.  But to figure that out he has to leave the US. Maybe that’s why travel is so liberating.  We notice we really have lots of choices.  At home this seem to escape us, probably because we are so set in our routines.

Complications are, well, complicated.  I guess I understand why it took Irving over 800 pages to tell his story.  I’ll try to keep short one example from my trip.

Walking by Reims Cathedral I saw this plaque in the ground and took a picture of it, just because I was intrigued with the phrase “engagent ensemble contre toutes formes de misere.”  It seems that in 1987 the citizens and church at Reims made some public proclamation that those “condamnes a vivre dans la misere” have their “droits de l’homme violes,”  that it is a denial of their human rights, if one lives in famine, violence, all forms of misery.  And they declare they are in solidarity with such sufferers.  Pere Joseph Wresinksi seemed to be the author of this statement.

A week later I’m at a retreat about the Holy Spirit in Vezelay, Burgundy with 20 French folks, and a woman Elizabeth is friendly to me, but we don’t really talk much and my French isn’t great.  Then I see her in the back of the basilica during a concert rehearsal and she motions me to sit with her and I almost think, “It’s a lovely afternoon, I think I’ll go sit outside before our next session.”  But I say to myself, no, slow down, reach out, connect.

So we sit, talk about France, where I’ve been, how I’d been surprised the week before to find a Joan of Arc celebration in Reims.  I offer to show her my photos of the parade. I’m zipping through the photos, swiping my Ipad as fast as I can, looking for Joan, and she spots the photo of this plaque, barely was it in focus as I swiped it.  And she cries out, “That’s my group!  That’s Pere Wresinski!” 

And we go back to the photo and she tells me in very passionate, very personal French how he worked with people in poverty during the war and after, how he articulated the policy later adopted by France and the UN that social exclusion is a denial of an unalienable human right, how she heard about that and said to herself, this is right, this is what I believe in and she joined in his work for years….  On and on she went, I stopped trying to understand the details and just listened to the passion and compassion and pride in her voice and her stories.

I had a choice, when she motioned me over.  I could have smiled, pretended not to understand, gone out to see the hollyhocks and the view and stayed in the middle ages and a nice spiritual buzz.  But instead I heard a complicated story about a painful issue and a passionate man and how the life of this woman gained purpose.  How in the midst of deep complications, he, and she, made a choice.

Looking back on my trip, and Irving’s intriguing phrase, I remembered this encounter.

Life, and travel, can be so very complicated.  And I am so grateful for the choices.

Copyright © 2014 Deborah Streeter

“Of Mice and Men” in Aachen

It’s good to be home at the Back Road Café, after a month traveling in the UK, Germany, Belgium and France.  I went to a lot of cool European cafes, but nothing beats the fine nourishment and great company of the good folks at BRC.

Aachen, GermanyEarly morning in Aachen, Germany, I was sitting at a bakery as rich in color and aroma as the town’s imperial heritage as Charlemagne’s ancient capitol.  Surrounded by happy German speakers, I only remembered one phrase from my one class in college, “Das bier ist gut hier in Munchen.” I had vaguely understood the 7AM mass in Charlemagne’s 9^th century Kaiserdom (Imperial Cathedral) from the familiar rhythms of worship, but I just wordlessly pointed when I bought my yummy bakery treats.  Reading my English guidebook I heard a man at the next table say to his friend, “Aachen, braachen, schnitzel, blitzen, neibuhr, lieber….Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men.”

I just blurted out, “Steinbeck!  I live in Monterey, California, Steinbeck’s town.”  Maybe I was so homesick, or just so relieved to understand something, that I asked the guy if he was reading Steinbeck’s great American Depression novella.  No, he said, in perfect English (Americans traveling in Europe are so pathetically mono-lingual, although mon Francais ce n’est pas mal).  Der Aachen Herr had just gotten back from New York City, where he had seen the poignant drama adaptation Steinbeck made, this year starring James Franco and Chris O’Dowd.  What did you think, I asked?  Oh, I loved it, he said, but my favorite show was Bullets Over Broadway.  Also Aladdin.  Oh, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, that was fantastic.  You saw four Broadway shows?  Ten shows in six days, he said proudly. 

I knew he didn’t have to leave Aachen to find theater since I had walked from the Bahnhoff to the Dom along Theatrestrasse, but I agreed with mein neue freundin that the lights are bright on Broadway. My homesickness was tempered by a little pride that this man had had a happy American theatre experience.  I remembered that it was early June and I would be missing the annual June Tony Awards on TV, the Oscars of theater, the crowning of NY’s theatrical stars.  Always an entertaining show, with a cool actor host, a witty opening monologue, classy acceptance speeches from articulate actors, scenes from the nominated plays, and some poignant tributes to drama history.  So when I got home I went to You Tube to watch selections from the 2014 American Theater Wing Tony awards I had missed while overseas.

Check it out if it’s available where you live.  In recent years the awards show only recreates scenes from the nominated musicals, not the dramas, which is too bad.  So I couldn’t see Franco trying to protect the gentle giant Lennie character played by O’Dowd from hurting himself and others, in yet another instance of how the best laid plans of mice and men oft go astray, thank you Robert Burns.  But I did see a clip of Neil Patrick Harris in a fantastic performance as Hedwig, the transgendered East German drag queen.  And a great song and tapdance routine of “Aint Nobody’s Business if I Do” from Woody Allen’s Bullets Over Broadway.

Last time I was in New York I went to the play “Jersey Boys,” the bittersweet musical about the 60’s group The Four Seasons, like myself a product of the Garden State.  Clint Eastwood has just made it into a movie.  I might go see it, but I think I’d rather just treasure the poignant memory of the stage production, sitting in the old ornate theatre with hundreds of other Jersey girls, laughing and crying and singing our adolescence.  “My eyes adored you.”  There is something about the shared live play that a movie can’t touch.

Like my Aachen friend who traveled 3000 miles to see ten New York shows in less than a week, I have many times experienced the power and presence that comes from live theatre.  And like my surprise rapport with him across barriers of culture and language, a stage play can tell a story that at first seems impossibly foreign and unintelligible.  But sitting there you realize, no, this speaks directly to me.  I live there too.  Lennie and I aren’t so different; I have hurt people unintentionally, lost dreams, had plans go astray. 

I sit in the dark and understand something, touched and moved and inspired.  I sit in the German bakery and understand a little, touched and moved and inspired.

Grateful always for the surprise encounters of travel and how small our world really is.

Copyright © 2014 Deborah Streeter

Remembrance Tourism

Note: “Blowin’ in the Wind” will be on hiatus for several weeks while I travel in England and France.  It will be fun to see Dale, the Wizard of The Back Road Café, in London.  I’ll be doing some pilgrimage walking and touristing among medieval churches in Norfolk, Eastern Wallonia, Champagne and Burgundy.  I hope to enjoy a green and wet North Atlantic landscapes after too long in brown, drought-strangled California.  I’m curious what America will look and feel like from afar.  See you in late June.

American soldiers and supplies arrive on the shore of the French coast of German-occupied Normandy during the Allied D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944 in World War II. (AP Photo)I don’t need to tell my European readers that 2014 is the 100^th anniversary of the beginning of World War I, or that this June 6 is the 70^th anniversary of the World War II D-Day landings on Normandy beaches. War seems to be an ever-present memory in Europe.   In every French and British church and town center, small and large, there are plaques and statues and monuments honoring the dead, praising their sacrifice. Maybe it’s because I often travel in June, but I always seem to be running into a parade or ceremony marking some war anniversary. 

But my American readers might be unaware of these anniversaries, because we can be pretty ignorant and uninterested in war or history or other parts of the world. Millions of Americans fought and died in wars during the past century, but since none took place here on American soil, we’ve not had to live with war in our front and back yard. Very few of our towns have war memorials.  Since we now have an all volunteer military, drawn in large part from minority and low income enlistees, many Americans simply don’t know any fighting men and women.

We hailed the returning conquering heroes of the World Wars, but since 1945 we’ve had little to be proud about in our international war efforts, no welcome home parades. We shunned and spat on Vietnam vets and now the vets of Iraq and Afghanistan suffer more when they come home, and commit suicide at a higher rate than war casualties.

The rest of the world may experience America as a military monster, but we citizens tend to be in denial about war’s prevalence and devastation.

Preparing for this European trip, especially since I’ll be in historic war corridors like the Ardennes and the Somme, I’ve discovered a new phenomenon, “remembrance tourism.”  On a Belgian tourist website I read, “Memory is the presence of the past in a society.  The expressions of this past are part of our daily environment.  Remembrance tourism focuses on the heritage sites that are linked to events or historical situations whose memory and heritage, often painful, have marked previous generations up to the present day….Remembrance tourism, combined with the cultural riches of Wallonia and Brussels, offers a vast array of exceptional discoveries, in a relatively small area, an area that hosted great confrontations and major moments of history.” 

After landing at the shore, these British troops wait for the signal to move forward, during the initial Allied landing operations in Normandy, France, June 6, 1944. (AP Photo)Those “hosted great confrontations” have become the inspiration for hundreds of special tours and events and exhibits this year to commemorate the two World Wars. For example, the new visitors center at Pointe du Hoc in Normandy expects several million visitors this year. After the big 50^th anniversary of D-Day in 1994, French and British and American tourist boards and military historians expected a drop off in interest and visits to Normandy landing sites.  But just the opposite has happened, in large part because of books and movies – think “Saving Private Ryan” and “Band of Brothers.”  And not just from history buffs.  There continue to be families wanting to see where Grandpa fought.  I find particularly touching the poignant tales of folks my age trying to understand their fathers better, these men who fought and bled and killed, but never spoke of it afterwards.  And those trying to make peace with fathers who came home mentally or emotionally destroyed.

Another new feature in French and British war commemorations is the inclusion of Germans, facilitating face to face encounters and even friendships between former sworn enemies.  This is another thing Americans wouldn’t do, I think; we are not great at forgiveness or getting along with folks in groups we have historically hated or feared (see: slavery and racism.)  I know in the East and South there are Civil War reenactments and memorials and commemorations.  Do North and South, Union and Confederates, commemorate together?  I would hope so, but I doubt it.

AP PhotoI happened to be a tourist in Normandy in June of 1984, not long after the big 4Oth anniversary D-Day celebrations.  Then President Reagan had just been there; there were still lots of American and French flags around, and an old guy at a beach hotel showed us the brass straight razor he’d gotten from a G.I American soldier, and he praised General Eisenhower.  It was odd and sort of nice to be appreciated as an American. 

We had our 2 year old son with us that trip and he galloped around the vast American Cemetery and climbed over the rusty German gunnery stations with gunmounts aimed at the beaches.  Every generation in my family had served in the army, even my brother in Vietnam.  I was a new mother.  Would my son have to go to war in 2004, I remember asking myself. 

He’s 31 now.  Not yet has his generation had to face a draft or a war in their own country or a moral imperative like Hitler that compels a whole people to go to war.  Maybe it’s just that we have privatized and profitized war to the extent the majority can ignore it. 

Putin just announced he’ll be at the D-Day ceremonies.  The image of him and Obama and other world leaders in front of the cemeteries of war.  Where have all the flowers gone?

Copyright © 2014 Deborah Streeter

Southern Baptists to the Progressive Christians: We Support Your Right to Preach Heresy

What’s going on in North Carolina?  The very progressive United Church of Christ in that state and the extremely conservative Southern Baptists there actually agree on a religious issue.

When the state voted overwhelmingly in 2012 to outlaw gay marriage, their legislature went on to impose a criminal penalty on anyone performing a wedding without a license. Since gays and lesbians couldn’t get licenses, clergy who bless their unions would face a $200 fine and up to 20 days in jail.

This past week the United Church of Christ (in which I am an ordained minister) filed a landmark lawsuit challenging this law, arguing in particular that it denies these officiating clergy their First Amendment right to “free exercise of religion.”

They found unexpected support from the President of the Southern Baptist Seminary in the state.  Rev. Albert Mohler, who has called homosexuality a “cancer” and used his pulpit for homophobic tirades against gay marriage, surprised even himself, I think, when he considered the UCC case in the light of a principle very dear to Baptists hearts, free expression of religion.

Calling the criminalization of clergy doing their job “dubious and dangerous,” Mohler said, “The guarantee of religious liberty means the freedom of heretics to teach heresy.” 

The UCC has long supported gay rights, ordaining an out gay man in 1972, and voting in 2005 in support of marriage equality. They have filed amicus (supporting) briefs on gay rights cases, such as last year’s Supreme Court gay marriage cases. This week’s lawsuit is just one more strategy in their public witness for gay rights.  They become the first Christian denomination to file a lawsuit in federal court on behalf of gay marriage. 

The secular legal strategy for gay marriage rights has until now been for gay couples, not institutions to file the lawsuits.  And these couples have argued their cases on the principle of equal protection, the Fourteenth Amendment; they are due the same rights and benefits of marriage as straight couples. 

But this lawsuit  - so different and groundbreaking that The New York Times put it on Tuesday’s Page One - argued that it was not just gay couples that are harmed by these laws, but clergy.  And the case was based not just on the Fourteenth Amendment, equal protection, but also on the First Amendment, free expression of religion.

That’s where Rev. Mohler comes in.  He wrote in his weekly blog,  “Evangelical Christians must both understand and affirm our understanding that religious liberty for us means religious liberty for all and that means that even as we advocate for religious liberty, we have to understand that the guarantee of religious liberty means the freedom of heretics to teach heresy.  If we deny religious liberty for others, very soon others will deny religious liberty to us.  That’s fair warning and this case bears close attention.”

This reminds me of the famous quotation attributed to Voltaire, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”  The First Amendment is best known as the Free Speech Amendment; it has inspired other unlikely partnerships, like the American Civil Liberties Union’s defense of the rights of Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan to exercise their Free Speech rights with public marches.

For years conservatives have used the First Amendment to defend the free speech rights of clergy to refuse to officiate at gay weddings where they are legal. But the UCC turned that prevailing wisdom upside down.

Instead they drew attention to the First Amendment’s equally powerful prohibition of any government interference with the free exercise of religion.  Since the UCC has long supported gay rights as theologically faithful, to prohibit clergy from performing such weddings violates their free expression rights.

I don’t expect to read Mohler’s name on an amicus brief or see him sitting behind the plaintiff’s table.  But the American religious landscape and denominational alliances got a bit muddier this week.  Or maybe clearer.  What would Jesus do?

Copyright © 2014 Deborah Streeter