I Have Questions

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

- The Constitution of the United States of America, Amendment 1

This may be much ado about nothing, but over the weekend I have seen a lot of troubling shots fired in our public dialogue, which is admittedly probably a bit more fraught with angst than usual.  I would like to remind all of my friends and neighbors that "peaceable assembly" is one of those high ranking rights that gets put in the Bill of Rights pretty much immediately.  Religion, speech, the press, peaceable assembly, redress of grievances, right there in A1.  Why so important?  Well because those were the things that monarchs and dictators often did not allow.  Furthermore, they are all things that people can tend to overlook in terms of oppression until it's really too late.

Let's face it, if the government were to crack down on, oh, I don't know, Islam, a lot of Christians and Jews might be inclined to sort of let that one slide, after all some of those people are terrorists.  If the government were to deny the right of free speech to the KKK or Westboro Baptist Church, many non-bigoted people might be inclined to even applaud the crack down on hate speech.  If Neo-Nazis are not allowed to march, if a propaganda spouting newspaper is shut down, if petitions are blocked by security (that actually happened last week, funny how few people noticed). The thing is though, the Constitution, if it has any significance to the wider world beyond these United States of America, is that it guarantees these rights to all people (I know it has taken us a while to really hash out what "all people" really implies).  That is perhaps the only solid foundation for any claim of American exceptionalism: we give these rights to the people, even if they cause trouble for us, even if they hinder us from some grand destiny, even if they hold us back from using our considerable power.

As a progressive person I still value the Constitution and its protections of the "inalienable rights" of human beings.  As a Christian, I admire our codification of rules that are designed to protect the "least of these" from the predatory instincts of the wealthy and the powerful.  I also appreciate that, while motivations may be different for people of conservative disposition or non Christian ethical perspectives, we could agree and find common ground on the founding principles of human rights and dignity.

Which is why I'm a bit puzzled this Monday morning about a few of the events of the weekend.  I have seen people, whom I know to be intelligent and thoughtful people, ranting about the protests that took place over the weekend.  I'm not talking about the burning and breaking riots that happened on Friday, those are not by any standards "peaceable assembly." I'm talking about the astonishing event of Saturday, the women's march, which took place here in DC and also around the world.  There was no violence, there was no disorderly conduct, I'm not aware of anyone being arrested or looting.  What I saw was a whole lot of women (and men) wearing pink hats and carrying signs expressing various sentiments of discontent and protest.  They didn't exactly have a unifying theme, they weren't exactly clear about why they were marching, because, as far as I can tell, out of the millions that participated there were millions of reasons for doing so.

I thought, as a whole, if you are an American and you appreciate our Constitution and our hallowed freedoms, you would appreciate what took place on Saturday, whether you agree with the purpose or not. Instead, what I heard via social media, are any number of challenges to the protests, some quite lengthy, some quite terse, all of which amount to the same thing: "you should just sit down and shut up."

I admit, since I agree with the sentiments of the marchers, it is easy for me to appreciate the beauty and power of what took place on Saturday.  I also admit that I may have had some less than savory opinions about the Tea Party Patriots doing similar things 7 years ago, but ultimately we need to understand that "destroying" (I believe is the overused clickbait word) your opposition is not the way our democracy is supposed to work. I am not telling you to stop voicing your opinions, that would be utter hypocrisy, I am rather raising a question to those of you who seem so angry about the pink hat crowd: Why are you mad? Is it because they disagree with you? Is it because they are upset about who the President is?

I'm sort of all out of outrage for the moment, but I'm really trying to settle in and find out what kind of action we the people need to take to actually make our union more perfect.  I find the hostility to the press, and peaceable assemblies sort of troubling, like road to fascism troubling.  I'm hoping that the next four years go substantially better than the last three days, I really am.