How Can A Christian Be For LGBTQ Rights? - Hate Mail - See the By The Way at the end

IN HIS PREFACE to his book The Real Jesus, Luke Timothy Johnson says:

When I was a PhD student in New Testament studies at Yale University in 1972, I wrote a paper for Professor Wayne Meeks on The Quest For The Historical Jesus.  Meeks thought it mediocre and commented on the cover sheet that I seemed strangely detached from the issue, as though it were not my problem.  As a Roman Catholic and (at that time) as a monk of the Benedictine tradition,  I agreed.  I did not think the historical Jesus was a problem for me or for my tradition.  I thought then that this was a peculiarly Protestant problem.  Well, Professor Meeks, here is the second draft.

When I read that, I understood just what he meant and it has everything to do with the place that Scripture holds in the Roman Catholic tradition and, I would assert, to an extent, the Orthodox tradition.  

While Scripture is held to be authoritative as a record of revelation, it isn't possibly understood in a literal or fundamentalist manner, it is respected, it is used to challenge, to upset, to shatter, to inspire and a means of salvation but it isn't the whole record of revealed truth and it isn't perfect.  And revelation didn't stop when the last word of the last Book in the canon was put on paper.  Creation continues, change continues.  The experience of those who wrote the Mosaic Holiness Code (for the priestly class) or the Pauline letters of the world is not our experience today.  While Paul certainly believed the end of time was coming on fast and he was eager for as many People as possible to be OK for the Kingdom, which is why I'm convinced some of his most troublesome passages were written, he didn't think fixing those ephemeral and tangential problems were what his commission was about, we know that Creation went on two thousand years past then.  What he said is something I value but not more than the experience of good and evil in the world I see now.  

That's something that you have to be honest about, every single person who reads Scripture now, does so out of the unofficial hermenutic of their own experience and their chosen loyalties, it's the same way that Paul read the Jewish Scriptures which he cited and used and modified according to his own experience of grace and about which he said some pretty shocking things, especially for a Pharisee such as he confessed himself to still be.  His view of The Law was certainly not the mainstream view of it among those who took it seriously.  His experience of the Risen Christ and what he learned from the Apostles who knew Jesus and witnessed his ministry, perhaps even from his family members, certainly led him to come to some rather unorthodox terms with the tradition he still professed to be a part of even as he held himself to be outside of it.  And if you can make those two parts of Paul's textual legacy cohere, be my guest.

There are many parts of Scripture (and, as a Catholic, tradition and the Magisterium)  which are problematic, many parts which are contradictory, many parts that no one could possibly make logically cohere with other parts of it and it is in no way a part of the further revelation of truth as Creation continues and human experience of that changes.  

While I think the Protestant reliance on "Scripture alone" is a very sometimes thing (as the Catholic Church fails to live up to its confessed faith, too) the general trend in its relation to Scripture would make such historical-critical practices of modernism far more shattering for Protestantism than for Catholicism.  Maybe that's why Biblical Fundamentalism is a peculiarly Protestant and not a Catholic thing, indeed, traditional Fundamentalism was as motivated by its hostility to Catholics as it was the modern world.  

One example of that Protestant ability to ignore Scripture when they want to is that there is not all that much taking seriously the words of Jesus on the prohibition on remarriage after divorce in most Protestant denominations and there could be nothing plainer in scripture.  And compared to that the order to sell everything we've got and give the money away to the poor and pick up our cross is taken even less seriously. 

That said,  there is nothing that has influenced me more than the writings on Scripture by some great Protestant scholars and theologians.  I don't think there is a Catholic or Orthodox writer who has had the impact on me that Walter Brueggemann has, or several others who could be named.  Before the Second Vatican Council most Catholics would have felt themselves to be morally or, more through a sense of fidelity to "our side" to not even read them.  Though that's not really as true as I'd have believed it at the time.  When I read that Pope Pius XII praised the theology of Karl Barth as being on the same level as Aquinas's I was shocked.  

This is a long introduction to a passage from an essay that Luke Timothy Johnson wrote about why he believed that LGBT relationships are compatible, not with the literal word of the Scriptures but in the extension of those and the foundational morality behind the moral codes through our human experience as Creation continues.   I think it's pretty close to what I think about that issue.

I think it important to state clearly that we do, in fact, reject the straightforward commands of Scripture, and appeal instead to another authority when we declare that same-sex unions can be holy and good. And what exactly is that authority? We appeal explicitly to the weight of our own experience and the experience thousands of others have witnessed to, which tells us that to claim our own sexual orientation is in fact to accept the way in which God has created us. By so doing, we explicitly reject as well the premises of the scriptural statements condemning homosexuality-namely, that it is a vice freely chosen, a symptom of human corruption, and disobedience to God’s created order.

Implicit in an appeal to experience is also an appeal to the living God whose creative work never ceases, who continues to shape humans in his image every day, in ways that can surprise and even shock us. Equally important, such an appeal goes to the deepest truth revealed by Scripture itself-namely, that God does create the world anew at every moment, does call into being that which is not, and does raise the dead to new and greater forms of life.

Our situation vis-à-vis the authority of Scripture is not unlike that of abolitionists in nineteenth-century America. During the 1850s, arguments raged over the morality of slave-holding, and the exegesis of Scripture played a key role in those debates. The exegetical battles were one-sided: all abolitionists could point to was Galatians 3:28 and the Letter of Philemon, while slave owners had the rest of the Old and New Testaments, which gave every indication that slaveholding was a legitimate, indeed God-ordained social arrangement, one to which neither Moses nor Jesus nor Paul raised a fundamental objection. So how is it that now, in the early twenty-first century, the authority of the scriptural texts on slavery and the arguments made on their basis appear to all of us, without exception, as completely beside the point and deeply wrong?

The answer is that over time the human experience of slavery and its horror came home to the popular conscience-through personal testimony and direct personal contact, through fiction like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and, of course, through a great Civil War in which ghastly numbers of people gave their lives so that slaves could be seen not as property but as persons. As persons, they could be treated by the same law of love that governed relations among all Christians, and could therefore eventually also realize full civil rights within society. And once that experience of their full humanity and the evil of their bondage reached a stage of critical consciousness, this nation could neither turn back to the practice of slavery nor ever read the Bible in the same way again.

Many of us who stand for the full recognition of gay and lesbian persons within the Christian communion find ourselves in a position similar to that of the early abolitionists-and of the early advocates for women’s full and equal roles in church and society. We are fully aware of the weight of scriptural evidence pointing away from our position, yet place our trust in the power of the living God to reveal as powerfully through personal experience and testimony as through written texts. To justify this trust, we invoke the basic Pauline principle that the Spirit gives life but the letter kills (2 Corinthians 3:6). And if the letter of Scripture cannot find room for the activity of the living God in the transformation of human lives, then trust and obedience must be paid to the living God rather than to the words of Scripture.

For me this is no theoretical or academic position, but rather a passionate conviction. It is one many of us have come to through personal struggle, and for some, real suffering. In my case, I trusted that God was at work in the life of one of my four daughters, who struggled against bigotry to claim her sexual identity as a lesbian. I trusted God was at work in the life she shares with her partner-a long-lasting and fruitful marriage dedicated to the care of others, and one that has borne fruit in a wonderful little girl who is among my and my wife’s dear grandchildren. I also trusted the many stories of students and friends whose life witnessed to a deep faith in God but whose bodies moved sexually in ways different from the way my own did. And finally I began to appreciate the ways in which my own former attitudes and language had helped to create a world where family, friends, and students were treated cruelly.

I'm thinking that sometime I might go through some of Luke Timothy Johnson's book mentioned above because I think he's quite a fair though thorough critic of someone who has been very influential on me, John Dominic Crossan and his colleagues in the Jesus Seminar.  I've said that Crossan's book The Historical Jesus and what he wrote about Paul was very important with my adult conversion from lazy, superficial agnosticism to chosen Christianity.   I agree with Johnson that Crossan, among those who are associated with him, is a couple of cuts above most of them and I still find some of what he said inspiring though I reluctantly have come to agree with Johnson's critique of some of his more basic stands on things like the dating of books in and outside of the Scriptural Canon.  His presentation of the general milieu of first century life as it was known to those who wrote the Scriptures informs my imagination of that background.  I will credit Johnson for pointing out something I admit I missed while reading Crossan, JDC was honest and explicit about having a theological agenda in his reconstruction of an "historical Jesus" and his handling of the texts.   The temptation of his critics is to point that out while not admitting that unless you are constantly on guard you cannot avoid doing exactly the same thing, whether it's out of belief or a choice of sides or of a rejection of it.  Mocking atheists do the same thing and they never, in my experience, admit that they do what they do, too. 

BY THE WAY: 

I should have pointed out this excellent post by RMJ on Creation, I was thinking of posting a link to it yesterday entitled

I Need A Little Easter Right This Very Minute

But I took an allergy pill and it made me too goofy to post anything.

One More Footnote On The "open, glaring and scandalous tissue of lies" Issuing From "the Slaveholding wing Of the Supreme Court"

WHEN I FIRST said that I suspected the reason the Taney majority in the Dred Scott decision made the unprecedented and outrageous claim that they could overturn the thirty-seven year old Missouri Compromise Act by fiat of the unelected Supreme Court, something we know they knew was an outrageous innovation through the dissenting opinions of Curtis and McClean which they certainly read before the ruling was issued, I said that I thought they meant to outlaw abolitionism and to crush it everywhere in the United States, nullifying state laws abolishing slavery in those states where it was abolished, by declaring that slave-owners could bring their slaves, as slaves anywhere they wanted to and to rent them out as the enslaver of Dred Scott and his family had done in what was supposed to be the free territories in the North.  

I hadn't, yet found contemporary confirmation of my suspicion but I fully expected that that contemporaneous evidence would be there and it is for anyone to have read.

Fredrick Douglass certainly knew that was what the Taney Court was up to when they made that extraordinary claim of extra-Constitutional power, in his 1857 address on the Dred Scott decision he said it exactly as I suspected it to be:

This last settlement must be called the Taney settlement. We are now told, in tones of lofty exultation, that the day is lost—all lost—and that we might as well give up the struggle. The highest authority has spoken. The voice of the Supreme Court has gone out over the troubled waves of the National Conscience, saying peace, be still.

This infamous decision of the Slaveholding wing of the Supreme Court maintains that slaves are within the contemplation of the Constitution of the United States, property; that slaves are property in the same sense that horses, sheep, and swine are property; that the old doctrine that slavery is a creature of local law is false; that the right of the slaveholder to his slave does not depend upon the local law, but is secured wherever the Constitution of the United States extends; that Congress has no right to prohibit slavery anywhere; that slavery may go in safety anywhere under the star-spangled banner; that colored persons of African descent have no rights that white men are bound to respect; that colored men of African descent are not and cannot be citizens of the United States.

You will readily ask me how I am affected by this devilish decision—this judicial incarnation of wolfishness? My answer is, and no thanks to the slave- holding wing of the Supreme Court, my hopes were never brighter than now.

I have no fear that the National Conscience will be put to sleep by such an open, glaring, and scandalous tissue of lies as that decision is, and has been, over and over, shown to be.

I would note that this speech was given thirty-seven years before The Lessons of the Hour,  wondering if he expected the court-power invented to do such evil would be definitively rejected and that slavery would be definitively abolished through changing the law and amending the Constitution.  The court-created power to both nullify laws passed by the Congress and to amend the Constitution as a fact by their rulings played a very large role in thwarting those idealistic expectations.  

The Roberts Court is sending us back to something that is closer to what the aged Fredrick Douglass experienced than I'd have thought was possible in the early 1970s though by 1980 with the changing Supreme Court, the media promotion of Republicans (just as they are now in their sinking of Joe Biden)  I was already beginning to understand that changing the law wasn't enough, it would have to be protected from both the imperial Court and the media that the court had freed to lie on behalf of the oligarchs.  There is no way to stop the imperial Court doing it unless Republicans don't win at the polls and the media are doing everything they can to make sure they will win. 

Update:  I should have recommended reading Fredrick Douglass's Dred Scott speech because it contains a concise catalog of the lies contained in the majority decision in the Dred Scott case, easier to get through than the dissenting opinions and fuller.   A lot of what can be said about the dishonesty of the current court, when they deign to give an excuse for their decisions, is contained in the criticism of the Taney Court.  I'm always impressed when I read Fredrick Douglass and am always reminded of what Lincoln said, that he was "the most meritorious man" he'd ever met.   

He also notes how even those who had been opposed to slavery were corrupted by subtle means of influence and by habituation to how things were, it's a remarkable act of understanding of the minds of the privileged class and how even their moral insights were able to be corrupted by the indigenous form of American fascism then, certainly that's the same now as it ever was.

I see in it a means of paving the way for our entire disfranchisement - The Roberts Court Is Doing Exactly What The Taney And Plessey Courts Did For Republican Partisan Reasons

YESTERDAY when I was planning on a second part answer to some hate mail from Fredrick Douglass's The Lessons of The Hour, I was intending to prove my contention of the place the media, the "free press" had played in peddling the Court power that Roger B. Taney invented to give him and the other slavery-supporting "justices" on the Supreme Court the ability to protect and extend slavery throughout the Country,  I will be quoting Fredrick Douglass's address on the Dred Scott Decision later because he, himself, made the point that it was clear to him that was why the Dred Scott decision had been written, creating that power for the unelected, lifetime appointed petty princes of the Supreme Court. 

But thinking more about the sordid lies of the Republican-fascists in the Senate, especially those with the power to block Democratic appointments, something which Lindsay Graham has already announced they will use to keep President Biden from making appointments to the Courts if they again gain control of the Senate, those appointed to the Judiciary Committee by the Republican-fascist leadership.  

What they did with their accusations of then Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson in the matter of her entirely main-stream sentencing of pedophiles and her pro-bono representation of clients as a lawyer, clients assigned to her, not chosen by her, was to revive two strains of racist propaganda which Fredrick Douglass noted was used in the post-Civil War period to reimpose white supremacy by terror and to gull Northerners into stupid acquiescent permission for them to do it.  First was that Black People were dangerous to white people through violence, and when they wanted to ramp it up, they invented an epidemic of Black sexual predation, mixing sex and violence in a way guaranteed to be carried by the media, the supposed higher end maybe with a bit of daintiness that the popular yellow journalism and, later the movies wouldn't have.  Dainty racism is more easily consumed by those with power so perhaps it is as dangerous as that which incites lynch mobs or Q-anon assassins.

The elite media not as much as the more popular and, so, influential, lower end but them as well.   The spread of the disease of racism certainly followed that pattern from the all-too-temporary suppression of it in the later 1960s and very early 1970 to the later 1970s when it became chic to express racism, in my memory I first noticed that among those of the smart set in New York City and, soon after, all over college campuses - though that might have been because I was in college in that period.  The alleged comedians were part of that vanguard and, so, as can be expected, it spread in the feuilleton pages of the big papers and in some of the magazines, especially The New Republic which were rather genteely and so even more vilely racist even before the 1990s. 

But I will give you that part of Fredrick Douglass's great last speech and ask you to consider things like the Central Park Jogger coverage in the New York Times which had no problem with accepting Donald Trump's ad calling for the judicial lynching of the innocent Black teenagers who were accused or the "ethical dilemma" promoted by the Washington Post scribbler Richard Cohen and The New Republic, along with the charges made by Marsha Blackburn that the then Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was soft on child porn possessors, joined in by other Old South Republican-fascists and some Northern ones, too.   The words change, the tactics are exactly the same ones today and the Northern "free press" has and is playing exactly the same roles as they were as their intellectual and amoral ancestors were.

But when events proved that no such conspiracies; no such insurrections as were then pretended to exist and were paraded before the world in glaring head-lines, had ever existed or were even meditated; when these excuses had run their course and served their wicked purpose;  when the huts of negroes had been searched, and searched in vain, for guns and ammunition to prove these charges, and no evidence was found, when there was no way open thereafter to prove these charges against the negro and no way to make the North believe in these excuses for murder, they did not even then bring forward the present allegation against the negro. They, however, went on harassing and killing just the same But this time they based the right thus to kill on the ground that it was necessary to check the domination and supremacy of the negro and to secure the absolute rule of the Anglo-Saxon race.

It is important to notice that there has been three distinct periods of persecution of negroes in the South, and three distinct sets of excuses for persecution. They have come along precisely in the order in which they were most needed. First you remember it was insurrection. When that was worn out, negro supremacy became the excuse. When that is worn out, now it is assault upon defenseless women. I undertake to say, that this order and periodicity is significant and means something and should not be overlooked. And now that negro supremacy and negro domination are no longer defensible as an excuse for negro persecutions, there has come in due course, this heart-rending cry about the white women and little white children of the South.

Now, my friends, I ask what is the rational explanation of this singular omission of this charge in the two periods preceding the present? Why was not the charge made at that time as now? The negro was the same then as to-day White women and children were the same then as to-day. Temptations to wrong doing were the same then as to-day Why then was not this dreadful charge brought forward against the negro in war times and why was it not brought forward in reconstruction times?

I will tell you, or you, yourselves, have already answered the question. The only rational answer is that there was no foundation for such a charge or that the charge itself was either not thought of or was not deemed necessary to excuse the lawless violence with which the negro was then pursued and killed. The old charges already enumerated were deemed all sufficient. This new charge has now swallowed up all the old ones and the reason is obvious.

Things have changed since then, old excuses were not available and the negro's accusers have found it
necessary to change with them. The old charges are no longer valid. Upon them the good opinion of the North and of mankind cannot be secured. Honest men no longer believe in the worn-out stories of insurrection. They no longer believe that there is just ground to apprehend negro supremacy Time and events have swept away these old refuges of lies. They did their work in their day, and did it with terrible energy and effect, but they are now cast aside as useless. The altered times and circumstances have made necessary a sterner, stronger, and more effective justification of Southern barbarism, and hence, according to my theory, we now have to look into  the face of a more shocking and blasting charge than either negro supremacy or insurrection or that of murder itself.

This new charge has come at the call of new conditions, and nothing could have been hit upon better calculated to accomplish its purpose. It clouds the character of the negro with a crime the most revolting, and is fitted to drive from him all sympathy and all fair play and all mercy. It is a crime that places him outside of the pale of the law, and settles upon his shoulders a mantle of wrath and fire that blisters and burns into his very soul.

It is for this purpose, as I believe, that this new charge un-thought of in the times to which I have referred, has been largely invited, if not entirely trumped up. It is for this purpose that it has been constantly reiterated and adopted. It was to blast and ruin the negro’s character as a man and a citizen.

I need not tell you how thoroughly it has already done its wonted work. You may feel its malign influence in the very air you may read it in the faces of men. It has cooled our friends. It has heated our enemies, and arrested in some measure the efforts that good men were wont to make for the colored man's improvement and elevation. It has deceived our friends at the North and many good friends at the South, for nearly all have in some measure accepted the charge as true. Its perpetual reiteration in our newspapers and magazines has led men and women to regard us with averted eyes, increasing hate and dark suspicion.

Some of the Southern papers have denounced me for my unbelief, in their new departure, but I repeat I do not believe it and firmly deny it. I reject it because I see in it, evidence of an invention, called into being by a well defined motive, a motive sufficient to stamp it as a gross expedient to justify murderous assault upon a long enslaved and hence a hated people.

I do not believe it because it bears on its face, the marks of being a makeshift for a malignant
purpose. I reject it not only because it was sprung upon the country simultaneously with well-known efforts now being industriously made to degrade the negro by legislative enactments, and by repealing all laws for the protection of the ballot, and by drawing the color line in all railroad cars and stations and in all other public places in the South; but because I see in it a means of paving the way for our entire disfranchisement.

Again, I do not believe it, and deny it, because the charge is not so much against the crime itself, as against the color of the man alleged to be guilty of it. Slavery itself, you will remember, was a system of legalized outrage upon the black women of the South, and no white man was ever shot, burned, or hanged for availing himself of all the power that slavery gave him at this point.

About The Confirmation of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson

IN THE EARLY HOURS of insomnia, as I was thinking about what the brilliant Fredrick Douglass said in The Lessons of the Hour, I thought about this:

It is another way of saying that slavery is better than freedom; that darkness is better than light and that wrong is better than right. It is the American method of reasoning in all matters concerning the negro. It inverts everything; turns truth upside down and puts the case of the unfortunate negro wrong end foremost every time.

Which is, beyond  any honest argument, exactly what Lindsay Graham, Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, Josh Halley, Marsha Blackburn and virtually the entire Republican-fascist caucus in the Senate and many of them in the House did in their vile attacks on probably among the most meritorious and morally upright candidates to be on the Supreme Court in its history, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.   And, while all of those named were from states of the former Confederacy, it wasn't, by any means, a regional phenomenon.  Other than the three Republicans who voted for her, it was a national Republican-fascist stand.  The slander and libel against her in the Republican and Republican-friendly media, online, proves that as well.  FOX is based in New York, it's fascist liars come from all over, Tucker Carlson is a San Franscisco product, Laura Ingraham comes from Connecticut.  They're probably worse in effect than even the scumbags like Blackburn and Graham, Cruz and Hawley, it's tempting to rank them in terms of their sliminess but there's really no need, all of them are sufficiently vile.   Almost as bad are those like Roy Blunt and the ever odious Chuck Gassley who certainly know that they've voted for and supported the likes of Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas who never had any business being on any court.  

John Roberts' lie that it was OK to overturn the Voting Rights Act because America was over racism of the kind it was made law to address is disproved more and more by his buddies and colleagues fellow Federalist Society fascist colleagues.  

America should face the fact that while we may have soothed our minds that fascism was a European phenomenon, we always had the same thing here, we just called it different names, just like they called slavery in the post-Civil War period other things while they were the same thing.  

If President Biden gets to make another nomination to the Court I hope he chooses another Woman.  Conceivably he could have the power to make it the first majority Women entity in Federal government.   I'll bet he could find someone like Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in class and poise and brilliance and moral stature.  None of the Republicans on the Court can touch her, especially in the latter category. 

no matter how hard he may work or how saving he may be, he is, in most cases, brought in debt at the end of the year, and once in debt, he is fastened to the land as by hooks of steel. If he attempts to leave he may be arrested under the law

WHEN FREDICK DOUGLASS was very old and had more or less retired from public life, in 1894, the great journalist Ida B. Wells convinced him to come out of retirement to write and present his last great address,  The Lessons of the Hour against the crisis of terror by lynching and the neo-slavery system that Southern lawyers, legislators, governors, judges and "justices" erected to not only reinstitute actual slavery in addition to the methods using trumped up crimes to abduct and enslave Black People and, I would bet, a few poor whites, but also through the civil laws, no doubt explained by the "freedom of contract" or some such other legal fiction.  He was explicit in calling it that and pointed out that unlike de jure slavery which had been abolished by the Emancipation Proclamation and, supposedly, the Thirteenth Amendment, it was actually MORE FINANCIALLY BENEFICIAL for the enslavers because they had no obligation to care for the elderly who couldn't work, those too young to work or too disabled to work, and so was even worse for many of the enslaved.  

All of this was certainly, beyond any doubt, known for what it was to state and federal judges and "justices" including members of the Supreme Court because some of them were beneficiaries of it directly and some were certainly complicit in it in other ways.   It was certainly known to their colleagues from other parts of the country, especially on the Supreme Court. 

Another mode of impeaching the wisdom of emancipation, and one that seems to give pleasure to our enemies, is, as they say, that the condition of the colored people of the South has been made worse; that freedom has made their condition worse.

The champions of this idea are the men who glory in the good old times when the slaves were under the lash and were bought and sold in the market with horses, sheep and swine. It is another way of saying that slavery is better than freedom; that darkness is better than light and that wrong is better than right. It is the American method of reasoning in all matters concerning the negro. It inverts everything; turns truth upside down and puts the case of the unfortunate negro wrong end foremost every time. There is, however, always some truth on their side.

When these false reasoners assert that the condition of the emancipated is wretched and deplorable, they tell in part the truth, and I agree with them. I even concur with them that the negro is in some respects, and in some localities, in a worse condition today than in the time of slavery, but I part with these gentlemen when they ascribe this condition to emancipation.

To my mind, the blame for this condition does not rest upon emancipation, but upon slavery. It is not the result of emancipation, but the defeat of emancipation. It is not the work of the spirit of liberty, but the work of the spirit of bondage, and of the determination of slavery to perpetuate itself, if not under one form, then under another. It is due to the folly of endeavoring to retain the new wine of liberty in the old bottles of slavery. I concede the evil but deny the alleged cause.

The land owners of the South want the labor of the negro on the hardest possible terms. They once had it for nothing. They now want it for next to nothing and they have contrived three ways of thus obtaining it. The first is to rent their land to the negro at an exorbitant price per annum, and compel him to mortgage his crop in advance. The laws under which this is done are entirely in the interest of the landlord. He has a first claim upon everything produced on the land. The negro can have nothing, can keep nothing, can sell nothing, without the consent of the landlord. As the negro is at the start poor and empty handed, he has to draw on the landlord for meat and bread to feed himself and family while his crop is growing. The landlord keeps books; the negro does not; hence, no matter how hard he may work or how saving he may be, he is, in most cases, brought in debt at the end of the year, and once in debt, he is fastened to the land as by hooks of steel. If he attempts to leave he may be arrested under the law.
 
Another way, which is still more effective, is the payment of the labor with orders on stores instead of in lawful money. By this means money is kept entirely out of the hands of the negro. He cannot save money because he has no money to save. He cannot seek a better market for his labor because he has no money with which to pay his fare and because he is, by that vicious order system, already in debt, and therefore already in bondage. Thus he is riveted to one place and is, in some sense, a slave; for a man to whom it can be said, “You shall work for me for what I shall choose to pay you and how I shallchoose to pay you,” is in fact a slave though he may be called free man.

We denounce the landlord and tenant system of England, but it can be said of England as cannot besaid of our free country, that by law no laborer can be paid for labor in any other than lawful money.England holds any other payment to be a penal offense and punishment by fine and imprisonments.The same should be the case in every State in the Union.

Under the mortgage system, no matter how industrious or economical the negro  may be, he finds himself at the end of the year in debt to the landlord, and from year to year he toils on and is tempted to try again and again, seldom with any better result.

With this power over the negro, this possession of his labor, you may easily see why the South sometimes brags that it does not want slavery back. It had the negro’s labor heretofore for nothing, and now it has it for next to nothing, and at the same time is freed from the obligation to take care of the young and the aged, the sick and the decrepit.

Anyone who tells you that slavery in the United States ended with the 13th Amendment is lying while telling the truth, after a fashion.  

Generally, it is claimed that the kind of American serfdom described ended with the depression, the mechanization of farming and the Second World War, making it profitable for the land owners to do what the Brits did when they stole the commons from the commoners and set them free to starve to death.  I would like to know more about that because there's one thing I'm sure of, it was not something that rich people absorbed any cost of.   That puts us within the realm of lived experience and families who many alive today were born into as they were suffering the aftermath of it. 

Anyone who tells you that no one alive today has not benefited from slavery and no one alive today was not harmed by it is lying, too, though that might be out of ignorance of real history instead of falsified hagiographic bull shit, the kind of history that Republican-fascists want told and the kind that Hollywood and show biz and "historical novels" traffic in, expanded into the internet now.   

And the newspapers, Fredrick Douglass had no illusions about the great "free press" being the tireless defenders of truth, justice and the alleged American way, which I plan on posting tomorrow.  Ida B. Wells certainly knew the uses to which "freedom of the press" was put by the enemies of equality, democracy and justice. 

This is one in a two part answer to some hate mail, by the way. 

A Footnote About The Persistence Of De Facto Slavery After The Emancipation Proclamation.

THE PROOF THAT REAL SLAVERY PERSISTED into the 20th century, overt slavery, with people being held in involuntary servitude in the former Confederate states. their bodies, their persons sold for profit, their rights alienated from them, is conclusive.  That the revived slave-power used legal fictions to enslave, mostly Black men, so as to pretend that the 13th Amendment to the Constitution was satisfied to the fictitious standards that lawyers and judges and "justices" pretend not to be able to see through was administered by the courts proves that lawyers and judges and, ultimately, "justices" were willing observers of and participants in that de facto slavery well into the 20th century.   That is the kind of lying to get along and go along I was talking about, though that takes many other forms, as well.  

Here's a lecture given at the Smithsonian by Douglas A. Blackmon about his book Slavery by Another Name: The Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.

You can read the introduction of his book here, though there is a prohibition on quoting it that I'd rather not risk at the NPR website.  It proves that the federal government knew about the pseudo-legalistic abduction of Black men, even children by county and local police and governments and sold into slavery, it was so common and so persistent that there is no credible argument that it totally escaped the notice of the federal judiciary and the Supreme Court which had members who came from some of those states which practiced de facto slavery during their professional lives.  

I would guess that that practice or its like persisted even longer along with its motives, that the white culture of slavery, the economic habits of those who owned cotton plantations and mines and lumber camps and turpentine distilleries, the habits of slaver-economics that were beneficial to those slavers and the habits of the underclasses who they preyed on are not entirely dead, now.  The popularity of the idea of reviving chain-gangs and other forms of brutal, involuntary servitude in Republican-fascist politics and entertainment media would support that, and, as with the revival of the KKK in the film industry during that period of overt neo-slavery, Hollywood and TV and the internet entertainment sectors will reinforce that kind of thing.  

That history is certainly a surprise to most white Americans, certainly those of us who grew up and were schooled where it didn't happen.   It is almost as certain that it was no news to Black People who certainly know more about their actual subjugation than people like me.  

The lecture by Blackmon points out that there was, actually, a period when the Emancipation Proclamation had some effect, even in the South, though not all over it.  He goes into a little detail about how alleged crime was the lever used to reimpose actual slavery for the benefit of the economic elite.   It would be interesting to find out how those with the power to reimpose slavery in that period through fictions peddled to susceptible whites and the kind of legalistic fiction that certainly doesn't really fool lawyers and judges and "justices" and the role that the media, the news and, especially, the more influential and potent entertainment media played in promoting those lies, through novels, through movies and through other means of corrupting the morals of that group most susceptible to such corruption, white Americans.   It would also be useful to show how the white laboring classes have had their own wages and work conditions damaged by the persistence of the stolen labor of those who should be their strongest allies in seeking justice instead of their enemies, as they get suckered into being.

Republicans Attempt To Legalize And Regularize Pedophilia In Tennessee As The Republican Party Labels Democrats As Pedophiles

 

I wish I could say this was an outlier but it isn't.  It's time to out the liars who had the pedophile rapist Denny Hastert as the longest term House Speaker, Republican House Member from Florida, Mark Foley as a known sexual groomer of underage pages, Alabama Republican judge and politician, Roy Moore, a child groomer who used his office to seduce and a child rapist as one of its major recent figures, and Republican Congressman Jim Jordan, who just said nothing as he is accused of witnessing systematic serial sexual abuse of wrestlers in his program while he was a coach of that weird sport in Ohio.   And that's not to mention such figures as South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsay Graham and, if I still had contacts in the LGBTQ community around DC, I'm sure I could name others even as I could name Republican members of the state legislature here and may well in the future.  

The Republican Party has invited LGBTQ members with information to out its hypocritical members in office, in the media, etc. AND I HOPE WE SOON WILL AND TELL ANYONE WHO DAINTILY OBJECTS TO GO STUFF IT BECAUSE THE REPUBLICAN PARTY HAS INVITED US TO DO IT. 

Every gay man and lesbian in the Republican-fascist party should be on notice that they will be outed ESPECIALLY IF THEY HAVE A HISTORY OF PREYING ON MINORS.   To the straight media figures who will throw their hands up in phony horror, they'd have no problem with that being done if it were Democrats who it was being done to, that it hasn't is evidence that there is no dirt there, though what they did to soon to be Justice Jackson when there was nothing to it AND THE GODDAMNED MEDIA WENT ALONG WITH IT shows that the media should be on notice, too. 

Lincoln On Dred Scott Part 2 - 2022 Is High Time To Take The Warnings of Jefferson and Lincoln About The Judicial Power Grab Seriously

And a week later he returned to the attack in his speech at Springfield, where he said:

" Now as to the Dred Scott decision;  for upon that he makes his last point at me.  He boldly takes ground in favor of that decision.  This is one half the onslaught, and one third of the entire plan of the campaign.  I am opposed to that decision in a certain sense, but not in the sense which he puts on it.  I say that in so far as it decided in favor of Dred Scott's master, and against Dred Scott and his family,  I do not propose to disturb or resist the decision."

Of course, as President, Lincoln disturbed it more than any other person in the history of the United States, remember this was how he made his argument during a Senatorial campaign where he would have had to win over a majority of the Illinois legislature which chose Douglas over Lincoln.  Apparently I was right that that was the system they used to select their Senators then.  So it was to those politicians that Lincoln framed his debate arguments to.   I have no doubt that he did that up to the point where he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which was probably absolutely essential to winning the war against legal slavery in the end.  Someday I might go into what Lincoln said about wage-slavery which he also opposed.

"I never have proposed to do any such thing.  I think that in respect for judicial authority, my humble history would not suffer in comparison with that of Judge Douglas.  He would have the citizen conform his vote to that decision;  the member of Congress, his;  the President, his use of the veto power.  He would make it a rule of political action for the people and all of the departments of the government.  I would not.  By resisting it as a political rule, I disturb no right of property, create no disorder, excite no mobs."

Lincoln then proceeds further to elaborate his position, and to defend General Jackson's view of the subject, by quoting Thomas Jefferson.  He refers to a letter of Jefferson's written in 1820 from which he quotes the following passages:

" You seem, in pages 84 and 148, to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions - a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.  Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so.  They have, with others, the same passions for party, for power and the privilege of their corps.  Their maxim is, 'Boni judicis est ampliare jurisdictionem'; [roughly translated, good judgment extends its jurisdiction. according to most of the lawyerly claims you can find online, allegedly to fit the requirements of justice, allegedly without overstepping the bounds.  To which I give a skeptical, uh, huh.  I see.] and their power is the more dangerous as they are in office for life, and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control.  The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that, to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots.  It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-soverigne within themselves." *

And after thus quoting Jefferson,  Lincoln proceeds as follows:

" Thus we see the power claimed for the Supreme Court by Judge Douglas, Mr. Jefferson holds, would reduce us to the despotism of an oligarchy."

"Now, I have said no more than this - in fact never quite so much as this - at least I am sustained by Mr. Jefferson."

"Let us go a little further . . . . The declaration that Congress does not possess this constitutional power to charter a bank, has gone into the Democratic platform, at their national conventions,  and was brought forward and reaffirmed in their last convention in Cincinnati.  They have contended for that declaration in the very teeth of the Supreme Court, for more than a quarter of a century.  In fact, they have reduced the decision to an absolute nullity.  That decision,  I repeat, is repudiated in the Cincinnati platform; and still, as if to show that effrontery can go no farther, Judge Douglas vaunts, in the very speeches in which he denounces me for opposing the Dred Scott decision, that he stands on the Cincinnati platform. . . .

"The plain truth is simply this:  Judge Douglas is for Supreme Court decisions when he likes, and against them when he does not like them."

Lincoln's last remark is as applicable today as it was at the time it was made, as the discussion of later decisions will show.  With this difference, however: Much as statesmen and constitutional lawyers may rail against a decision, and denounce it as unwarranted by the Constitution and as an invasion of constitutional rights, very few will nowadays take the position that Congress or the Executive Department may disregard a decision of the United States Supreme Court, no matter how unwarranted by the Constitution.  This latter attitude is, however, due to the fundamental change of the position of the Judicial Power in our scheme of government, the foundations of which were laid, and the future course whereof was foreshadowed, in the momentous decision in the fateful Dred Scott Case. 

In Louis Boudin's next chapter in which he discusses these issues during Lincoln's presidency and the Civil War which the Dred Scott decision facilitated even as those pudding-heads on the Supreme Court believed they were restoring "national peace and harmony" through it.  He demonstrates that Lincoln, repeatedly, proved himself as good as his word.  He had no problem ignoring or disregarding or rejecting the Taney Court's opinions in conducting the Civil War.  

It is an absolute certainty that if he had dared to rule on the Emancipation Proclamation, Taney and his associates would have nullified it, no doubt emboldening the Confederacy and causing havoc in several of the border states that weren't in rebellion against the United States.  He would have cited the Constitution on the matter of depriving slavers of their "property."   He sourly complained that emancipation was an act of military over civil power not long before, finally, he left the bench because he finally died, remaining as one of the most rightfully infamous names in American history.  

Lincoln's administration was what should have been a definitive rejection of the Supreme Court power which has, in fact, become one of the most destructive parts of subsequent American History, as Boudin has pointed out in the rest of his book.  It is an American tragedy that Lincoln's rejection of that power didn't become the precedent for how subsequent American history should have considered the limits of Supreme Court power.

And, in fact, as soon as Taney, no doubt with extreme reluctance, had to administer the Presidential Oath to Lincoln, during his First Inaugural Address  Lincoln paraphrased Thomas Jefferson's rejection of even the milder form of Judicial Power he was commenting on in his letter,  letting Taney and his associates know that he would not be following their declaration of their "new wonder of the world," their claim to have the power to nullify duly adopted and long enacted laws.

I do not forget the position assumed by some that constitutional questions are to be decided by the Supreme Court, nor do I deny that such decisions must be binding in any case upon the parties to a suit as to the object of that suit, while they are also entitled to very high respect and consideration in all parallel cases by all other departments of the Government. And while it is obviously possible that such decision may be erroneous in any given case, still the evil effect following it, being limited to that particular case, with the chance that it may be overruled and never become a precedent for other cases, can better be borne than could the evils of a different practice. At the same time, the candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal. Nor is there in this view any assault upon the court or the judges. It is a duty from which they may not shrink to decide cases properly brought before them, and it is no fault of theirs if others seek to turn their decisions to political purposes. 

As Louis Boudin pointed out, such open rejection of the judicial power that the Taney Court invented so it could nullify the Missouri Compromise Act and, with that, all subsequent efforts to forbid the further extension of slavery or its possible, eventual prohibition, faded as the Supreme Court further exercised that power after the Civil War and the Civil War Amendments ended at least the legal form of slavery, even as it continued and was revived in the Jim Crow period on a de facto basis.  I have not extensively looked into it, but actual slavery persisted in the former Confederate states well into the 20th century despite the Emancipation Proclamation.

No doubt, as with Senator Sheldon Whitehouses' analysis of the motives of the elite lawyers and law school members of the abortive Biden Supreme Court Commission,  top-flight lawyers and law scholars found it in their professional interest to go along with it instead of continuing the opposition of such earlier lawyers as Thomas H. Benton and Abraham Lincoln.   The ignorant, foolish acquiescence to an extra-constitutional power of the Supreme Court to overturn much of the hardest won legislation extending equality, rights and even the right to vote that my generation and later ones grew up in, was built on such knowing  going along to get along with the imperial Supreme Court which, like all anti-democratically constituted governing bodies, will protect and extend its prerogatives as much as any monarch or dictator or other gangster with power will do.   The analysis of the dangers of having life-time appointed Supreme Court "justices" unanswerable to The People through a vote, approval after a term of office has expired and the other possible, though too little used, means of voters turning bad politicians out of office is certainly as valid today as when Jefferson wrote his letter.  The same year, by the way that the Missouri Compromise Act came into power, the law that was the first one that the Supreme Court overturned in exactly the way Jefferson and Lincoln warned about and which Lincoln was in a position to reject.  

The law is, by habit, by self-interest and by custom a conservative tending, elite profession, its billing habits alone and the willingness of judges to allow the wealth of one side or another to enter into the process is a guarantee that any such power will support wealth and, so, the kind of power that is gained by wealth.  It is an anti-egalitarian profession which practices its craft under what is typically an anti-democratic branch of government. 

The idea that the Congress and President are bound by such law nullification and Constitution amending by a 5-4 or even a unanimous Supreme Court in carrying out the enumerated duties of their office is ever more dangerous because of the number of lawyers educated and habituated to accept that Supreme Court usurpation on the way they conduct their supposedly co-equal powers, powers handed to them directly by the Voters for the Congress and indirectly to the President through the abomination of the Electoral College.  

It is especially repulsive that the Congress should feel so inhibited because while the Court claims that power for itself to restrict the actions of the Congress, the Court rejects that the Congress has any power to impose binding ethics rules on the lawless Supreme Court, the most openly corrupt branch in terms of taking benefits and socializing and meeting with and taking their instruction from dark money sources, many of whom have business before the Court.   

The Supreme Court, especially in the years of the Rehnquist and now the worst of recent ones, the Roberts Court is out of hand, it is time for the warnings of Jefferson and Lincoln to be taken seriously because what they predicted has already come to pass. 

*  In his letter of September 28, 1820, after a lengthy discussion of how the Marshall Court extended its power beyond where the Constitution set its limits, Jefferson concluded with this warning:

Pardon me, Sir, for this difference of opinion. my personal interest in such questions is entirely extinct; but not my wishes for the longest possible continuance of our government on it’s pure principles. if the three powers maintain their mutual independance on each other, it may last long: but not so if either can assume the authoritie’s of the other. I ask your candid reconsideration of this subject, and am sufficiently sure you will form a candid conclusion. Accept the assurance of my great respect.

In the rote and absurd reverence that Jefferson has been held in, it's remarkable that these serious warnings about the Supreme Court when it overstepped the enumerated powers granted it in the Constitution are unknown, uncited, taken as of no value, especially when Lincoln, either the greatest or second greatest of our Presidents, the man who did more than any other president before Lyndon Johnson to make good on the promises Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, the very basis of American independence, took that danger so seriously and openly defied it while he was president.

This Is The Level of Foreign Influence That The Roberts Court Facilitated In Its "First Amendment" Decisions

 

 

 

In case anyone forgets, that Putin's henchman, liar and probably spy, soemone who even George W. Bush called "a complete asshole," Sergey Lavarov, was welcomed into the oval office along with others who were certainly security risks by Putin's most successful weapon against the United States, the Republican President, Donald Trump.   The context of that coup by Putin working in concert with the Republican Party is best given in what Trump told Lavarov that day.

 “I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job, I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”

You don't need to feel sorry for the FBI director, James Comey, because he did as much as anyone to put Trump, the candidate of Comey's party, into the White House, which no one should ever forget when that sanctimonious asshole is mentioned.    Something he has yet to apologize for even as what a catastrophe he wrought in sandbagging Hillary Clinton became undeniable even to that big boy scout.

That Lavarov can be safely assumed to be a spy was probably not necessary because it is known Trump gave him highly classified information that was not even given to America's actual allies, risking the lives of our intelligence sources,  at that meeting:

President Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in a White House meeting last week, according to current and former U.S. officials, who said Trump’s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State.

The information the president relayed had been provided by a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government, officials said.

The partner had not given the United States permission to share the material with Russia, and officials said Trump’s decision to do so endangers cooperation from an ally that has access to the inner workings of the Islamic State. After Trump’s meeting, senior White House officials took steps to contain the damage, placing calls to the CIA and the National Security Agency.

“This is code-word information,” said a U.S. official familiar with the matter, using terminology that refers to one of the highest classification levels used by American spy agencies. Trump “revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.”

To put this propaganda and intelligence compromise coup in current context, this was also mentioned at the tail-end of the reporting of that event:

“Trump emphasized the need to work together to end the conflict in Syria,” the summary said. The president also “raised Ukraine” and “emphasized his desire to build a better relationship between the United States and Russia.”

But while it is right to call out Comey, there was no one who did more to put Trump, Putin's puppet, there than the Court majority in the Citizens United decision which was issued despite warnings by many that to rule the way they did would open up the United States to dangerous political influence by foreign dark money as it did domestic billionaire money.   

The Roberts Court is probably the most dangerous Court in terms of national security we've ever had since Taney was trying to hamper Lincoln's conduct of the Civil War in Maryland.   The role that they played in opening up our politics to dirty money, even more than the Berger and Rehnquist Courts did, proves that the Court overturning clean-election laws passed in the wake of the Nixon crime spree was among the most dangerous things that Court has ever done.   And they did it by citing the sacralized and totally inadequate First Amendment, among others.   Their use of it proves that it can be that kind of danger as it is written.   It has to be amended to remove any of the amoral and absurd idea that there is ever a right to lie that is protected as "free speech."  

There is a direct line between those court decisions and our Country having been in the hands of Vladimir Putins' willing puppet who, if he wasn't worried about the rumored blackmail video would have certainly sold out the United States, Ukraine and Syria to get a Trump Hotel in Moscow.   And unlike the presidency, the Court is even more solidly in the control of the Republican-fascist majority that those decisions have enabled and empowered.

You Think I'm Being Too Hard On The Gangster Lawyers In Black Robes?

ABRAHAM LINCOLN explicitly said that considering the decisions of the Supreme Court with the sanctity we now grant those decisions was a new thing in his time.

The sacredness that Judge Douglas throws around this decision is a degree of sacredness that has never been before thrown around any other decision.  I have never heard of such a thing.   

You have to ask yourself how that novelty, starting in what is generally considered the worst decision the Supreme Court has made, written by one of the most deservedly infamous "justices" ever to sit on that Court, became the general habit in thinking about it as the Court handed down some almost as bad decisions.  Such as not only enshrining Jim Crow and the lie of "separate but equal" they used to cover up their establishment of legally enforced inequality in Plessy v Ferguson but a long list of other decisions that enforced wage slavery, discrimination, inequality and the majority of its rulings which favored the rich, the powerful, the white, the male, the elite over everyone else. 

I would post it as a general rule of how power is exercised, especially in an anti-democratic power such as the Supreme Court is, that one of the primary motives is to look where the power and wealth at stake lies and to suspect the exercisers of power will come down on that side of things.   I would bet you that an honest evaluation of Supreme Court power would show that that most absurdly adulated and sacralized branch has, in fact, ruled for that power and wealth in a majority of its cases, probably a large majority of them.  The record of the Roberts Court in cases involving the interests of large Republican donors is, in the evaluation of Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, more than 80 to zero, the zero being those against whom the interests of the large Republican donors have been exercised and supported by what might be the most corrupt Court since de jure slavery was legal.  They are speeding up and not slowing down on their corruption and evil.  Certainly it is the worst Court since the period when de jure Jim Crow was abolished, though that's such a short time ago that it's not saying much.  They are already reimposing de jure Jim Crow through the Republican-fascist voter suppression acts they have rubber stamped.  They are advancing the subjugation of women under the power of Republican-fascist state legislatures and the Republican-fascist packed lower courts at the same time.

I think the absurd dramatic and fictional presentation of the Supreme Court, in its antiquated tones of reverence, what actually informs most of those aware that such a court exists in the United States, is falsified on its behalf for the benefit of those who finance and run show biz and publishing.  The "free press" is as big a part of that sales job as anyone.   If they made one big movie exposing the real and sordid history of the Supreme Court it would blow what's been a very profitable racket for those with money and, so, power.  

I say take the pseudo-ecclesiastical fancy dress off of them so they don't fool the rubes that they're anything more than lawyers who, mostly, are hacks.   The few who have conducted their lives and their term of office respectably and even benevolently are few and could easily stand on their work without the trappings and lies. 

Lincoln's Judgement Of The Supreme Court's Usurpation Of Supreme Power Part 1

IT IS RIGHT AND INEVITABLE that the foremost figure in the reaction to the Dred Scott decision and its consequence, the Civil War, should close out Louis Boudin's proof against the Supreme Court usurpation that allows it to nullify, with anything less than a unanimous decision, duly enacted laws adopted by the democratically chosen branches, the Congress and the President and to, in fact, by undemocratically selected Court fiat, amend the Constitution without the democratic branches or the super-majority of the state legislatures required to do that IN THE CONSTITUTION.   Abraham Lincoln, a respected and seasoned lawyer and one at the top of any list of the  undoubtedly great presidents in our history explicitly condemned that very aspect of the decision of the Taney Court which has survived to be used for all manner of evil by later courts.  

It is important enough and detailed enough that I'll give it to you in two or three posts instead of another really long one. 

In the first instance, it was in the famous debates between him and Stephen Douglas, about which little more than the name would be familiar to most people, so paltry is the education about the most important parts of our history.   It should be remembered that this was part of Lincoln's campaign to be named a Senator from Illinois, a political campaign so he was, no doubt, tailoring what he said to appeal to those who would make that decision.   I will speculate that was, at that time, the state politicians and not the voters at large, though I will confess I have not researched that.  I would appreciate anyone who knows how Illinois chose its Senators at that time telling me if I'm wrong or right in that assumption because I'd really like to better understand the context of how Lincoln crafted his arguments.  I don't think I'm wrong to read something more radically abolitionist behind his well crafted debate speeches, perhaps others did too because Lincoln didn't get to be a Senator but he did get to be President, the only office chosen by voters in the entire country.

Lincoln stated his views on the subject [the Dred Scott decision and the judicial power it created] very clearly.  In his famous Chicago address, delivered on July 10th 1858, during his canvass for the Senatorship against Stephen A. Douglas, he said:

"I have expressed heretofore, and I now repeat, my opposition to the Dred Scott decision;  but I should be allowed to state the nature of that opposition, and I ask our indulgence while I do so.  What is fairly implied by the term Judge Douglas has used, 'resistance to the decision'?  I do not resist it.  If I wanted to take Dred Scott from his master, I would be interfering with property, and that terrible difficulty that Judge Douglas speaks of,  of interfering with property, would arise.  But I am doing no such thing as that;  all that I am doing is refusing to obey it as a political rule.  If I were in Congress, and a vote should come up on a question whether slavery should be prohibited in a new Territory, in spite of the Dred Scott decision,  I would vote that it should."

" That is what I would do. Judge Douglas said last night that before the decision he might advance his opinion,  and it might be contrary to the decision when it was made;  but after it was made he would abide by it until it was reversed..  Just so!  We let this property abide by the decision, but we will try to reverse that decision.  We will try to put it where Judge Douglas would not object, for he says he will obey it until it is reversed.  Somebody has to reverse that decision, since it is made, and we mean to reverse it,  and we mean to do it peaceably."

"The sacredness that Judge Douglas throws around this decision is a degree of sacredness that has never been before thrown around any other decision.  I have never heard of such a thing.  Why, decisions apparently contrary to that decision, or that good lawyers thought were contrary to that decision, have been made by that very court before.  It is the first of its kind:  it is an astonisher in legal history.  It is a new wonder of the world.  It is based upon falsehood in the main as to the facts, - allegations of facts upon which it stands are not facts at all in many instances, - and no decision made on any question - the first instance of a decision made under so many unfavorable circumstances - thus placed, has ever been held by the profession as law, and it has always needed confirmation before the lawyers regarded it as settled law.  But Judge Douglas will have it that all hands must take this extraordinary decision,  made under these extraordinary circumstances, and give their vote in Congress in accordance with it, yield to it and obey it in every possible sense.  Circumstances alter cases."

"Do not gentlemen remember the case of that same Supreme Court, some twenty-five or thirty years ago, deciding that a national bank was constitutional?  I ask if somebody does not remember that a national bank was declared to be constitutional?  Such is the truth, whether it be remembered or not.  The bank charter ran out, and a recharter was granted by Congress.  That recharter was laid before General Jackson.  It was urged upon him, when he denied the constitutionality of the bank,  that the Supreme Court had decided that it was constitutional;  and General Jackson then said that the Supreme Court had no right to lay down a rule to govern a coordinate branch of the government, the members of which had sworn to support the Constitution - that each member had sworn to support that Constitution as he understood it.  

"I will venture here to say that I have heard Judge Douglas say that he approved of General Jackson for that act.  What has now become of all his tirade against 'resistance to the Supreme Court'?" 

First, this proves, beyond any doubt, that it was general knowledge that what the Supreme Court did in its nullification of the Missouri Compromise Act was an "an astonisher in legal history," that it was "a new wonder of the world," to someone who would certainly have been aware of Marbury v Madison, which our falsified history of the Court Power tells us was its origin, cleansing it of its actual origin in one of the filthiest decisions the Supreme Court has laid down in its dodgy history. 

Certainly a lawyer as experienced and brilliant as Abraham Lincoln was, he knew the territory of his time, the status of the law, the history of it probably better than today's hagiographic network court reporters, the scribblers of later fiction and fictitious journalism and probably even the present members of the Supreme Court, those who peddle the Supreme Court's usurped powers to a passively receptive audience when the truth is those powers were usurped in one of the most evil decisions the Court has foisted on the country, that is before the abominations that the Roberts Court has put out and has in store.  

He clearly rejected the Court's power-grab in its nullification of the Missouri Compromise and in his debate speech he certainly indicates he suspected what I have concluded were the plans of the slave-power on the Court, to overthrow other democratically adopted laws that restricted or abolished slavery.   He craftily noted that the hero of Douglas's party,  Jackson, rejected an earlier, far more modest, assertion of Court power in a positive decision that a national bank was Constitutional.  A decision that was far less of an extension of Court power than the nullification of a duly enacted federal law.   

Lincoln certainly rejected the new Court power that Taney and his associates who concurred in the Dred Scott decision created for themselves because he said if he were to be a member of Congress (which we should remember Senators are) that he would have no hesitation to support legislation that went against the dictates of the Dred Scott decision, a level of Congressional assertion of authority that is lost today, so passive have we all been made through the habituation to that still outrageous usurpation of power by the Supreme Court, lulled by the rare benevolent uses of it by the atypical Warren Court.  

So we can see that someone as expert, someone who had the confidence of so many of the Voters, someone who is rightly considered one of our greatest presidents and among the foremost figures in the struggle for equal rights rejected not only the substance of what the Taney Court did but its creation of the power of the Court to overturn duly enacted laws, even laws of long standing.  The Roberts Court is doing as much as they dare to do of what the Taney Court did.   They are doing so on as political a basis as Lincoln critisized the Taney Court for doing and they are doing so on an even more obviously raw partisan political basis.  They are making strides to reimposing Jim Crow conditions to prevent Black People and other People of Color from voting, NOT ONLY IN THE FORMER CONFEDERATE STATES BUT IN ANY STATE WHERE REPUBLICANS CONTROL THE STATE GOVERNMENT but they are also reimposing the subjugation of Women depriving them of their most intimate rights in even more intimate ways, effectively nationalizing their bodies in ways that are more outrageous than I hope Women will tolerate.

There has never been a better time to definitively reject what the Roberts Court is doing and to once and for all cut the Court down to a size where it cannot either by intention or by lack of experience and wisdom endanger the hard won struggles against the worst aspects of the slavery-enabling, democracy-hampering and hardly perfect, not even "more perfect" Constitution.  I'll have more to say about that in the next post in this series.

On The Accusation Of Christians Automatically Being "Conservative" - Hate Mail

I WAS BEING ACCUSED of apostasy from "the left" almost a decade ago because I held there were morals higher than "The First Amendment" or "The Bill of Rights" or "The Declaration of the Rights Of Man," etc.   Or, in fact, any program of pie-in-the-sky, never to be achieved, OR NOT POSSIBLY ACHIEVED IN THE NEAR FUTURE theorizing. 

 There is plenty of territory to the left of "the left" and it's power comes from the belief that God made things so as materialist, atheist, scientism flounders around in denying that we are more than machines made of meat, that our thoughts are predetermined by the content of, not out character, our minds or our souls but whatever molecules happen to be in our heads and, stupidest of all for them and any kind of morality, that their necessary claims that there are no such things as moral absolutes, in which case any society that wants to do anything from not voting for atheists to discriminate against atheists to make atheism a capital crime is OK as long as that's what they like.  There is, by the way, no more wrong with someone not voting for an atheist on that ground than there would be to not vote for an FLDS polygamist or a Catholic Integralist (FYI, bunkie, Catholics aren't fundamentalists but they can be integralists).    I doubt that you would ever vote for either and I certainly wouldn't.  There are many People of many identities I would not vote for THOUGH I HOLD THEY ARE OWED EQUALITY OF RIGHTS.   There is no right to hold public office, it is a privilege one earns by gaining the majority of votes in an election by the free choice of voters.   I have voted for at least one atheist in the past but he was not a materialist or a believer in scientism.   If he had been he may not have had my vote.

It's not that difficult to find yourself far more radical as a Christian than you were when you were an agnostic such as I was.   Back when I would have described myself as a democratic socialist, though one who always rejected Marxism.   Now I'm a radical leveler who thinks socialism is small potatoes next to the radicalism of the Mosaic Law and the Gospel of Jesus.

Here's what I said August 20, 2013.

No.  I'm more radically radical than I've ever been, more desirous of changing reality, moving towards the real agenda of radicalism.  There is nothing more really radical than reality. The entire program of political radicalism of, as I usually put it, traditional American liberalism, consists of actually making the lives of people better.  Nothing any radical-in-their-own-and-millions-of-others-minds has ever done is as radical as the passing of  a law that feeds and houses poor people, provides people with health care, or even a local statute that protects a spot of the environment.   No matter how much they declare or what they advocate to achieve that greatest desideratum of those on the play left, to be the most leftist of all in the room,  without really improving lives they're no different from the mushy middle and the conservative status quo.  Worse, they discredit the real left, hindering their work.

There is nothing more radical than the agenda I have:

 - Total equality,

-  Holding that rights are as real as the screen you're reading this on held in tension with the as real  rights of everyone else and so,

-  The stand that there is a real, consequential obligation to respect those rights in other people and another obligation to demand the equal ability to practice them for yourself and others.

Nothing, nothing that exists in the entire leftist books sections of the set of all of the libraries in the world, is more radical than that.  And I doubt anyone can come up with something more radical.

Now I would point out that there is no scientific or logically demonstrable "proof" of that, it's a choice to believe it based in experience and observation AND A BELIEF THAT THAT IS HOW GOD ORDERS THINGS.   If any atheist has an explanation for their belief in it while being a materialist or a believer in scientism, I'd like to see them try and make it unassailable to their fellow materialist-atheist-scientism believer buddies.   If you think that admitting that that belief is a choice impeaches my belief, you chose to believe what you do, you just won't admit it.

Standards Of Judgement Standards Of Execution - The Notable Difficulty Of Outlawing Lynch Law Under The Secular Constitution And The Woman Taken In Adultery

TODAY'S GOSPEL READING AGAIN is one of the most well know stories including Jesus, from John's Gospel, The Woman Taken In Adultery.  I looked up in my archive and found I've written on it more often than I remembered, largely because it's something Christian-haters love to claim was a fabrication because the earliest manuscript of John's Gospel doesn't contain it.  I'm tempted to go into the problem of coming to such a conclusion based on even the earliest surviving manuscript didn't have it because we have no idea if that manuscript is typical of those which didn't survive - something there is no possibility of determining in the absence of those, presumably, destroyed or decayed and unavailable pieces of evidence necessary to make such a case on. 

I'm also tempted to go into how academics are always tempted to turn what might be a very weak argument into boldly definitive statements due to the political economy of ideas in the modern university-publishing system and, especially in the area of religion, especially the monotheistic religions, the desire to make a big splash in the media distorts things.  Remember, it wasn't that long ago the media and scribblers and the Xian-bashers online were obsessed over the claims that a tiny fragment of manuscript mentioned Jesus having a wife?   Only the piece of papyrus was soon after proven to be a rather obvious forgery whose provenance would have caused a careful scholar more interested in the truth than getting into the news to have checked and concluded it was bull shit.  

In the absence of other, contemporary or older manuscripts to check, for all we know the one that has survived is an outlier among many which contained the story.  In which case, no doubt, all manner of scholarly speculation as to why that scribe left it out would become a minor avenue of scholarly hucksterism, even as speculations as to why it was allegedly inserted have been peddled.  But not one that would get the media splash that the "Jesus's wife" forgery led to. 

The other claim made about it, that it was inserted into the Gospel of John by later hands because it depicted Jesus as being literate,  tells us more about the snobbery of educated People than it does about the authenticity of the story.   I've said before that if Paul was illiterate, as modern scholars claim, something that is rather remarkable as Paul, himself, said he was not only a Jew but a Pharisee, one zealous for the law, that I'd be ever more impressed at him being able to compose Romans without resort to a number of drafts.  

I've come to share the skepticism of the modern historical-critical method of Scripture study because I think it adds layers of imagining about what is there without admitting that that's what it inevitably does.   Not a single one of us has any of the original material in our experience except by reading or hearing it and what we create out of that in our imaginations.  When you imagine the lives, practices and circumstances of the scribes who copied or who first wrote down the Gospels, you are reconstructing them and their times and their work in additional acts of imagination.  And in that, unless you are extremely careful to question yourself and your conclusions based on your own motives, you will inevitably do what Walter Brueggemann criticized some members of the Jesus Seminar of fading memory, that they constructed a Jesus who was a lot more like them than they would have admitted. 

I choose to believe the story of The Woman Taken in Adultery because I think what Jesus taught in it was true and one of the Gospel's most valuable lessons in the moral necessity of real and effective humility in human judgement of other people - among the harder of the hard lessons that are not only throughout the Gospel of Jesus, one which is actually not very popular among People.   It is the hard teachings, the ones which are so contrary to seeming human nature that lead me to believe the Gospels tell a lot of what  happened, if not it would have been smoothed over and simplified and packaged for easier sale to the least common denominator, which I think is a better  measurement of authenticity than the speculations of scholars based on manuscripts and fragments of manuscripts and scholarly traditions of that.  If anything, I'd imagine that getting it straight from Jesus would have been far more radical than they dared to write down.

I have asked, and ask again, why anyone who believes themselves to be liberal would want to throw out this story, powerful and of a potential influence for the better that nothing in secular liberal scribbling has any potential of ever being.  The story puts good will and charity and humility in judgement over even the letter of The Law.  It is anti-patriarchal, the violence meted out to Women who transgress their role as men's property being as intrinsic to patriarchal oppression as the violence that is always an intrinsic part of holding people in chattel slavery.  It's clear that the animosity to Christianity that is endemic to modernistic academic culture is what those people  - not a few of them who make their living off of scribbling and babbling about the Scriptures -  truly value more than they do what Jesus says and does and its effect on the lynch mob in the story.   

I find that far more credible than the scene in To Kill A Mocking Bird in which Scout standing by the cartoon hero of Atticus dispels the lynch mob, something I'm sure they love to believe in all their heart, though I'd really like to know if any such thing ever happened in the history of American lynch law.   The attempt to finally outlaw it on a federal level is still not a done deal, though President Biden was signed it into law AFTER MORE THAN A CENTURY OF IT BEING INTRODUCED FOR LEGISLATION MORE THAN 200 TIMES.  It took a lot more than an imaginary little girl to stop it.  But I'll bet the clever Jesus haters of the blogs would believe that bit of juvenile fiction as authentic truth with all their childish hearts.

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And speaking of the malignant potential of the Supreme Court, whose whim the Emmet Till Anti-Lynching Act could overturn by a simple majority,  the passage from Thomas H. Benton I posted on Friday contained this:

 . And where it otherwise - was Congress to look to judicial interpretation of its powers - it would soon cease to have any fixed rules to go by:  and the Constitution itself, like the Holy Scriptures, in the hands of councils and commentators, would soon cease to be what its framers made it.

By sheer chance, while I was on Youtube a video appeared on the side  that tried to explain the difference between what we usually consider the Orthodox churches from the "Oriental Orthodox" churches, their long and separate histories being founded on whether or not they accepted the conclusions of Councils called by late Roman emperors in the 4th and 5th centuries, and a few later ones.  Councils that split over questions of the most esoteric distinctions about things which the Scriptures are, I would suggest, not even vaguely concerned, things about the mystery of the physical nature of Jesus - which is obvious in the Gospels and his association or identity with God - about which, obviously, those who study the Scriptures and the enormous literature about such things can disagree with.  I would bet that if you asked most of the adherents to the various Orthodox traditions anything about those questions and they would likely not even be aware of them being questions.  Such things are of more importance to hierarchs protecting their turf and theologians protecting their imaginary turf.   

I doubt anyone who Jesus said was saved in the very Scriptures being made that use of would have had any idea what the theologians and bishops and patriarchs were talking about.  Clearly it's not necessary for salvation, if you claim to believe that Jesus spoke with authority NOT THAT EVEN THAT STORY KEPT YE OLDE CHRISTIAN MONARCHS AND THEIR GOVERNMENTS FROM DOING EXACTLY WHAT JESUS SAID YOU HAD TO BE WITHOUT SIN TO DO.  Them and modern, secular democracies.  Clearly, if the claim to believe Jesus spoke with the authority of God had so little influence, anything short of that kind of authority is even less likely to get the job done.

The video noted that there have been recent attempts of reconciliation among the different Orthodox Churches on the basis of good will and charity with the certain backlash of those with a vested interest in the divisions that outweighs any good will or charity they seem to also disdain.  As someone brought up in Catholicism in the reaction against the best council ever conducted by the Catholic Church, Vatican II, that sounds all too familiar.   Vatican II was too much justice, too much good will and charity for the Catholic right, much of it astro-turf funded by big money and other powers of this world.  Same as what stole the Court.