Note the footnote about our "new creation" and how it wasn't, really created new.
I HAVE DECIDED to continue on with the disrupted series I'd planned on Luke Timothy Johnson's lecture on the Christian conception of freedom.
You might remember in the first two postings, LTJ discussed Paul's use of common identity markers of female-male, slave-free, Jew-gentile, relativizing them in the lives of those who lived under those markers. LTJ pointed out how identity markers of ethnicity, gender and class were both used and subverted by Paul, demoting those to secondary or lower status, pointing out that in Christ those didn't matter to the converted.
Twice, also, Paul uses the identity marker of ethnicity to make the same point. In 1st Corinthians 7:19, he states flatly, circumcision is nothing, lack of circumcision is nothing, what counts is keeping the Commandments of God.
Similarly in Galatians 6:15, he declares, quote, "Neither circumcision or lack of circumcision, but a new creation."
To appreciate just how radical such statements are we can remember that a pious Jewish scholar would include among his morning prayers, quote,"I thank you God that I am a man and not a woman, a Jew and not a gentile, a free man and not a slave."
Note that in Christ differences in gender, status and ethnicity do not disappear but they are made relative by a new and higher form of unity. Indeed, for Paul such identity markers can serve not to divide humans but to demonstrate how unity in Christ is not a uniformity but a unity in diversity. And such diverse unity is the ideal in the new creation.
I will break in here to say this reminds me of Abraham Joshua Heschel's conclusion that God favors religious pluralism, something I'm sure Paul would have rejected but something which I think is probably true even as I say that in the broader society no religion that doesn't allow freedom to everyone, including in terms of religious thinking, needs to be treated on an equal basis to that religion that does recognize that freedom.*
It's clear from Paul's discussion of spiritual gifts within the one body of Christ. It is the gift of the spirit that empowers diverse roles and functions within the community and Paul makes clear that the point of persons being diversely gifted is the enrichment of the common life of the community. The gifts are to be used to build up the community rather than the self. As he says in Ephesians 4:12, The Spirit bestows gifts, quote, "to equip the saints for the work of service to build up the Body of Christ."
Just as for Paul cultural practices concerning diet are not of fundamental importance they are what philosophers called "adiraphia" [spelling?] things that don't matter so are these more obvious identity markers. Paul tells the faithful in Rome who would make judgements on the food habits of other Christians, quote, "The Kingdom of God is not eating and drinking but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit." And he tells the Corinthians, "Food does not establish us with God, we are not less if we do not eat and we are no greater if we do eat." Thus, although Paul claims the right to be able to eat meat offered to idols, if his behavior becomes a stumbling block to a brother or sister he declares, quote, "I will never eat flesh again in order that I not offend my brother or sister." I'll return to this passage later. But for Paul what really counts are not societal placements or societal customs but moral dispositions and actions. Paul goes on to employ all three identity markers of antiquity in his long discussion of marriage.
I have come to think that Paul's extreme change from a zealous Jewish persecutor of the followers of Jesus to being among the most active converter to the Jesus movement as described in his letters and in Acts and the source of much of the most profound intellectual foundation of Christianity was due to a profoundly powerful near death experience when he was stricken on the road to Damascus and encountered the Risen Jesus. That's something that is reported in careful collections of Peoples' accounts of their own reported near death experiences, now,. They often report experiences that differ in their details that they come away from convinced that things that were central to their own identities, as central as the most basic cultural practices of devout Judaism, seemed to them to be beside the point or even of no importance at all. AND THOSE EXPERIENCES HAVE THE POWER TO TRANSFORM THEIR LIVES RADICALLY. I think that is central in coming to a coherent understanding of Paul in the context of our only source material about him and his theological writing in the New Testament.
Of course academics writing in the post-"enlightenment" period couldn't base an acceptable academic paper or lecture on seriously discussing that possibility, at least that I've ever come across, so if my conjecture is right it would not become widely accepted in academia or in more popular culture. In academia even considering the Risen Jesus as possibly real would make much if not virtually all of it dismissive. Which, considering some of the "historical Jesus" production is pretty outlandish and unsupportable on the available evidence, is tellingly remarkable. But if I'm right that that's what Paul's experience was then I don't think you're able to come up with a coherent understanding of Paul, his ideas and what they really mean. Without that assumption I doubt you can come to anything like a close understanding of him or his writing or, as Luke Timothy Johnson seems to understand it, the writings of his close circle.*
In terms of Paul's uneasiness with new practices that would upset the ambient cultural contexts in which he and his followers and those who could be influenced by him were living out their lives, things that would upset believers in their faith in what he understands to be the meaning of Jesus and his teachings or cause them problems that would damage or destroy the communities of believers, I think you have to read him with a complete understanding. His letters were always written with those purposes. You have to follow the long arcs of arguments he makes especially noticing where his warnings against feelings and expressions of self-righteousness in opposing the ideas and even practices of those who don't see eye-to-eye. What are sometimes taken as his pithy statements are merely parts of those arguments. I think his mistake in expecting an imminent world-wide coming of the overt Kingdom of God, a return of Jesus, plays a big part in his advice to retain many of the customs, habits, practices of the world while being transformed by the experience of conversion to belief and, so, changing the way in which those practices are performed. His advice to a slave holder to stop treating his slave as a slave would, effectively, end slavery.
His advice to those who those who found the sexual practices of unbelievers abhorrent not to ignore their own questionable practices is more subtle and more difficult to discern in his argument. If there's one thing I've found out, there is no topic quite like sex about which to make a reasoned point with and being entirely misunderstood. Christianity has been distracted by Paul's use of sex in arguments in a major way for close to two thousand years.
We know from his own writing that far from restricting Women to a diminished role in the ministry of Christianity that has been taken as a rigid gender identity marker, he, himself, recommended Women as leaders of Churches, his fellow missionaries and messengers. It's notable that in the centuries after Paul his own writing was used to leave Women to a lesser role, denying them of authority or independence from oppressive male authority and it still is. Though a deeper, closer, broader focus on his writings, noticing things that you will entirely miss if you take a "proof texting" strategy of finding what you want to find instead of what he actually said, you will find he frequently meant the opposite. One of the things which I hold is that you cannot understand Paul or any part of the New Testament without subjecting what was said to the test of measuring it against the Commandments of Jesus, to do to others what you would have them do to you as you are, with the diverse identities that you have, that don't hurt them or degrade them or seduce them into destructive acts or a context in which they will suffer violence, displacement or destitution. I haven't read any comparison of the knowable cultural differences that Paul may have taken into account when he wrote on such things to different communities, it would be good to know if he tailored his words to take things like that into account.
I think it should always be considered that one thing Paul would have been deeply and importantly aware of would be that the fledgling churches and new Christians he wrote his letters to would always be in danger of destruction THROUGH EXACTLY THE KIND OF THING HE DID TO FOLLOWERS OF JESUS BEFORE HIS CONVERSION. They'd have been in mortal danger from those who were like him before his conversion and probably even more at risk from the ambient, ubiquitous pagan cultures in which those new Churches and individual believers lived. He'd certainly have been concerned for their physical well-being and their own missionary efforts to be carried out safely and effectively while not being drawn away from the practices that were central to their identities as followers of Jesus.
I think there is no greater example of that risk today than the "christian nationalists" especially those who live in places where Republican-fascism, white supremacy is common and in control of things. That's why easily most of the "Christianity" that is spouted on the floor of Congress, in most statehouses, out of the most overt public shouting out of "Christianity" is done by people whose actions and statements are thoroughly Mammonist and entirely out of keeping with the words of Jesus and the un-proof-texted-entirety of Paul and the rest of the New Testament.
I think Paul might have had an inkling of such minds and lives, though coming well before Christianity became a mere identity marker based on a corrupt cultural milieu, I doubt even he could have foreseen how bad it could get. He certainly had the warning of Hebrew Scripture in which the early and frequent falling away from the vision of Moses, the heart of The Law constitutes the large majority of the texts within it. The difficulty in keeping the Law seems to have been one of the major obsessions with those who wrote scripture and an often unstated knowledge that to not keep to the heart of The Law was to abandon what created The Children of Israel as an identifiable People. It was certainly the understanding of the Prophetic literature out of which Jesus taught. It would have certainly been something that Jews living in diaspora communities would have constantly been aware of, something that is common to those who live as a minority among large populations sometimes at odds with what identified them as belonging to their own identity group. I think Paul's conservatism in regard to social convention and custom has to be read in light of that reality. He would have constantly been trying to discern what such Christians would need to do to live among sometimes dangerous "others" while not letting that extinguish what was central to the teachings of Jesus. Walter Brueggemann and Terry Eagleton have both commented on how extremely impractical and radically different the teachings of Jesus were, how profound a change from the ambient culture of then, now and any time between them those would have made someone who tried to follow them faithfully. Even those trying to live within the narrow margins of Paul's "conservative" orthodox behavior were at risk of being persecuted and destroyed. The current "christian nationalism" set in Republican-fascist Mammonism is a reenactment in which they are so "christian" that they have totally abandoned The Gospel and the rest of the New Testament for some lesser comic book version of it. You can be certain that one of the things they would abolish was Christianity which actually tried to follow the teachings of Jesus and who wanted American law and policy to do so as well. The history of Christianity is full of the vigorous and murderous suppression of efforts to do so, even within churches, the Catholic Church was certainly guilty of that in the past, the last two papacies practiced that as well, the "traditional Catholic" billionaire AstroTurf effort against Pope Francis is just such an effort.
I will also point out that that is what I have come to believe is the basis for the hostility to the Jewish People from Greek antiquity, through the middle ages till today, that the still radical egalitarianism of The Law was already unwelcome by those who wanted to live lives of self-centered selfishness even before something that was radically more so in the teachings of Jesus. It was certainly what made Nazism and before then the newly conventionalized antisemitism of a Wilhelm Marr target Judaism. What, ironically in the context of subsequent history, made Marr and the central faction of Nazism, oppose Christianity. What led Marr to condemn Christianity as the "New Judaism" that he considered to be the vehicle by which "Judaism" "infects" traditional German culture which was romantically considered a warrior ruled golden age but which, like all warrior rule would have been more a gang dominated horror. No doubt being heavily influenced by Nietzsche in that. Nietzsche was an insane (perhaps syphilitic) but brilliant and educated man, Marr and the Nazis were more vulgar and Trumpian in their depravity.* Of course, being a brilliant promoter of such stuff is no less dangerous than being a vulgarian bigot is. The Ivy Leaguers of modern American Republican-fascism, those already indicted and those who have yet to be, prove that. It should never be forgotten that Nazism had its scientific, university educated wing just as the Prussian military establishment did, the kind who would explain Nazism as "applied biology." The history of elite American antisemitism and racism, within elite institutions needs more focus because I think that has always had a far stronger effect in law and policy than has ever been admitted.
The young LGBTQ+ writer and thinker Matthew Vines is, I'd guess, half my age or less but he has come to some of the same conclusions I did much later in life. Central to any coherent understanding of Scripture is the advice of Jesus to judge teachings and ideas by the results that come of them. "By their fruits you will know them," something which I started out this year by saying was a crucial saying in my judgement of things. Matthew Vines started out as an evangelical and, no doubt, was far more of a reader of Scripture than I spent most of my life being even as we share the same experience of being gay men in different settings, him growing up in Kansas, me in New England decades earlier. He grew up in a world in which LGBTQ+ rights were a far more developed and widely spread context. When I was his age "gay liberation" was hampered by the idiocy of mid-20th century play-lefty bullshit. While there is still plenty of that around, there seems to me to be more real-life informed thinking as well. Even in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he says his profound experience of admitting to himself that he was gay*** happened, would hardly have been as overtly and casually accepting of being LGBTQ+ when I was his age. An enormous difference in a cultural setting in a relatively short time in any one location can come about very rapidly in terms of even one human life. When you throw in the differences in even a small distance in location, the differences can be quite profound. I would bet that you wouldn't have to travel very far outside of the neighborhood of Harvard in Cambridge Massachusetts or some areas of New York City or San Francisco, even neighborhoods within the city limits to find profound differences right now. The differences in how you can openly live your lives even if you appear to blend in with the ambient appearances, people who don't stand out as different can be decisive in how safe or comfortable you can live your life. Certainly there is nothing in Jesus that is consistent with using violence or intimidation to enforce conformity, though that has been done in the name of Jesus from pretty early in the movement of is followers, especially when some of them started getting worldly power for themselves.
* Luke Timothy Johnson has said that he holds a far wider range of the letters traditionally attributed to Paul to be more a product of Paul's inner circle. He has used the model of speech writers for the Presidents, in which things like the State of the Union message is a product of a number of other hands but that the president delivers them as "his" State of the Union message. He thinks that accounts for some of the ambiguously attributed denials of his authorship that are so current in contemporary scholarship.
David Bentley Hart has said in the "Scientific Postscript" p. 469-470, of his translation of the New Testament that in him translating the Greek texts into modern English, he has become convinced that two of those letters widely held to be spurious, Ephesians and Colossians were not so legitimately denied to be "authentic" Pauline texts. He notes that in especially Colossians the denial of Pauline attribution was due to the Protestant denial that "works" were redemptive as compared to "faith." He makes a good case that that is an example of late Classical distortion through, who else, but Augustine was enormously magnified by Luther and the other early Protestants when a reading of the original Greek of the Scriptures doesn't support that. "Paul was not a Lutheran or Calvinist or even an Augustinian. And, so, when Paul of the authentic letters is freed from the Paul of theological myth, it turns out that Colossians not only says nothing different on these matters at all, but does not even sound any distinctly different intonations."
It was in dealing with an entirely different question of provenance of texts that led me into being quite skeptical of the alleged science of textual analysis that is practiced nowadays and, especially, the cutting of corners in making alleged scientific claims on the basis of a small body of examples from which to make such proclamations in academic publications. DBH does note that the author of Ephesians seems to not share Paul's belief that the return of Christ was imminent, though it's quite possible for the same author to change their mind about even things so central to their belief. I've certainly changed some of my ideas in the seventeen years I've been writing stuff and posting it online, often in light of new information about old things and watching how some of my previous beliefs have born fruit since 2006. I originally intended never to bring up religion in trying to find out how the American left had gone so seriously off as to be permanently disempowered by its own refusal to change its ideas. See where looking hard at things brought me in those years.
** I also hold that there was a crucial difference in "antisemtisms," certainly there is one in regard to those who held Jewish identity was a biological matter as the Nazis did. The Jewish Catholic Archbishop of Paris, Jean Lustiger, attributed the origin of antismeitism to Voltaire (with some real and legitimate justification), though the idea was also true of anti-conversos elites in 16th century Spain - especially those bishops and others who resented the rise to power of those of Jewish heritage within the Catholic hierarchy. I think in the most legitimate use of the term "antisemitism" it is in its worst phase a phenomenon of modernism. I think something like a claim of depravity as a biological attribute also was present in what became influential with his popularization, especially in Germany, in Tacitus. But I think the central catastrophe of that in the 20th century Shoah was, on the other hand, far more a direct result of the adoption of natural selection within science and, so, secular culture. I doubt that Voltaire, Tacitus or, especially, a fringe group of Spanish bishops who never gained much traction or influence in the wider Catholic hierarchy could have had such power, even combined as those never were. That is the crucial aspect of the murders of six million Jews during the Nazi period, which has never been addressed or even much admitted though the overt part that played in the Holocaust, is as plain as can be in the primary documentation left by those who committed those murders. I don't think the current denial of it having happened is at all unrelated to that denial of reality. I don't think natural selection can ever be made a safe ideology and its retention in science and human culture is a guarantee of that history repeating itself as long as such an idea is mixed with human notions of biological identity, themselves deeply counterfactual in any but the most tangential matters, is retained and influential in actions. Paul, the self-identified Jew as a Christian certainly saw Christianity as surpassing such notions, though he would also know that even conversion to Christianity would not guarantee that such evil assignment and use of identity markers was no guarantee against them or evil perpetrated through them. I think that's part of what was missed by the misuse of Paul. Paul might note identity markers or even that some of them had some kind of basis but he certainly held that those were no excuse for committing evil. Not in thought, certainly not in deed. He never advocated violence and oppression of even those he held were engaged in immorality. Jesus certainly didn't. He even advised against resisting evil, which, of course, you have to be a saint to do, especially when it's evil done to those you love. The Republican-fascists are no more followers of Jesus than those who colluded with the Nazis were.
NOTE: I wrote this more than two weeks ago and am just posting it today after recovering it. Even I am surprised how long it got as I worked on it. In the meantime someone who read some of the posts I did on Darwinism has whined and complained about my many posts laying out how Nazism and the Shoah were a product of the belief in natural selection, mixed with German romantic (post-Christian, "enlightenment") notions of linguistics and nationality. I should organize and edit those many posts because they lay out the evidence pretty extensively, though hardly exhaustively. Among the key findings proving that link were the statements of Leonard Darwin, Charles Darwin's son and last-surviving child who, in April, 1939 months before the start of WWII and the direct implementation of Nazi genocides credited his father's invention of natural selection as being the foundation of German eugenics and even at that late date, after Kristallnacht, after two decades of Nazis targeting Jews, Slavs and others for suppression, oppression and elimination, credited the Nazis as changing German law and policy for what he termed was the better.
As I pointed out many years ago, in 1939, with a quite ample demonstration of just what Nazi eugenics was and where it intended to go, Leonard Darwin, perhaps the last person alive who could have made such an attribution from such intimate knowledge of Charles Darwin tied his father and his science to Nazi "racial hygene" (eugenics) which was overtly eliminative well before then. That wasn't an outlandish idea, Darwin's claim to fame, natural selection, was universally acknowledged to be the entire reason that eugenics, including German eugenics existed. I have yet to find a single authoritative or less-than-authoritative voice from before WWII who denied that. Certainly no one with the status and credibility of Leonard Darwin did. No one in the post-war period had the credibility and authority for separating Darwinism from Nazism which Leonard Darwin had in connecting them so late in time. He'd been doing so in terms of English language eugenics for decades in the most explicit terms and he was among those who encouraged the development AND IMPLEMENTATION of eugenics in Germany. No one at the time he did that who could be held to have had his level of authority to do so to contradict him. I have yet to find anyone who did, either. No one else had known Charles Darwin as intimately as he had, if they had tried to contradict him he would not only have his own authority to make that link, he would have the writings of German scientists and social thinkers and a line of English language scientists extending back to the publication of On The Origin of species which he could have cited, as well. HE COULD HAVE CITED WHAT HIS FATHER WROTE IN THE DESCENT OF MAN, DOING THAT. I have given only some of those on this blog, including such major figures in English language science as Karl Pearson, Francis Galton, Charles Davenport, and many figures considered minor now but who were prominent and often among the most eminent scientists of their time. Even the American biologist and a complete Darwinist, Vernon Kellogg to his horror found that pre-Nazi German military officers regarded their role in World War I in overtly Darwinist terms. Many of them likely those who joined and formed the Nazi party. I never thought that would become a major focus of this when I started doing it but, especially after finding out about the existence of "Darwinian economics" which, among other things, encouraged a higher death count during the Covid-pandemic, I think it's inescapable because it is both the intellectual and sub-intellectual foundation of current day eugenics which dare not speak its name. And it's just as overtly homicidal as it was starting with Thomas Huxley in 1865 gleefully anticipating the genocide of American Black People after emancipation due to what he believed would be the loss of an economic incentive with the ending of slavery for the "superior" white people to keep them alive. He did that well before Nazism focused natural selection on a different list of those to kill. I wonder if Huxley ever commented on the end of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow era American apartheid and de facto slavery. But I don't have the time or resources to look to see if he left a record of that.
*** I have said before that I don't recall a time when I didn't realize I had a physical attraction to adult males, though never when I was even a young adult, those of my own age. I remember when I realized that attraction was a sexual attraction in my early adolesence but it was always there. I don't remember ever feeling ashamed of it, though I never remember a time when I didn't realize it was among those of my feelings that it would be dangerous to express in the context of where I lived. Today that last thing is among the things that have changed, somewhat. My LGBTQ+ nieces and nephews don't have those issues but the ambient culture has given them other dangers to face, the encouragement of promiscuity probably among the most dangerous of those. Sexual freedom doesn't change biological fact, promiscuity is inherently dangerous and, therefore, morally perilous. Though my understanding of those moral perils are resonant with what Paul said, I have come to believe, as L.T. Johnson has said, the traditional often officially theological understanding of that as "Christian morality" is less than securely Pauline and, in light of our own experiences of the consequences of actions far from morally secure.
Seeing the clearly unequal, unjust and extremely dangerous liberties that even judges who have put Trump under restrictions for his dangerous speech mete out - as someone said, no obscure Black Person who has faced a court and acted even once like Trump does every day has ever escaped immediate imprisonment, even before trial - I think the deeply imbedded inequalities that are embedded into judicial practices need to be studied, listed and campaigned against. I think some of that comes from the structure of the legal profession in which the "best" lawyers are those who serve those with enormous wealth, hired to find ways for the rich and merely affluent to get a million and one privileges for them, everything from the most petty of considerations up to and including getting lots of people killed without those doing them paying any price. That is something that is as deeply embedded into the culture of lawyering, from there into the judging profession and, especially, the racket that being a "justice" so often is. That is deeply embedded into the rules and practices of courts and Supreme Courts, embedded into laws written by and passed by those who even if not completely enculturated lawyers are familiar with the rackets and schemes of the law.
That Attorney General Merrick Garland has proven to everyone what an impotent coward "the law" is in the face of Donald Trump and the Republican-fascist attempts to overturn the landslide election in one of the most decisive votes the United States has ever taken doesn't surprise me now. In my reading about the history of the Supreme Court and how corrupt that most august American institution has always been, with few periods of ethical behavior, approximately two short but often most unwise ones, I've come to think that those inbred corruptions - under our system having no possibility of correction by The People's vote - are some of the biggest obstacles for and dangers to egalitarian democracy. In the disgusting tale of Joseph Story, originally called "an abolitionist justice" issuing what was rightly considered the most outrageously pro-slavery decision in Prigg v Pennsylvania, even rightly seen as a proto-Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court based on his smug and self-satisfied scholarship of the long history of property rights under English common law, I came to my first real appreciation of how deeply entrenched that kind of casual, accepted, moral atrocity is in that secular, hierarchical priesthood that the Supreme Court is. And from them on down to the lowest courts. I understand he also extended the practice of higher courts reducing awards in lawsuits, such as protects many an outrageous properited maimer and killer today.
Why the United States should ever have thought it was required to take on the entire apparatus of the injustice of English law when it produced and in turned was produced by the very thing the "founders" had broken away from. the British monarchy, is probably due to the large number of well trained, aristocratic, rich lawyers among them. They certainly knew how such ancient legal lore had served their own financial interest, the interest of their families and friends - just as "justice" Coney-Barrett and the others can be counted on to rule in a way that serves her own families' wealth, today. The "founders" also would have found an entirely new legal system founded on the propositions contained in the beginning of the Declaration of Independence, equality and with the endowment of rights by God rather inconvenient in that they'd have to junk so much of what they'd been taught and learned to become lawyers. It would certainly have thrown up in the air much of what "settled law" already protected the wealth of the wealthy and given the plebs some notion that they had rights that would be very costly to the wealthy who the "founders" were. Perhaps now that the Roberts Court, their lying under oath before the Senate Judiciary Committee has shown what a lie "settled law" is, it is high time to unsettle much of that "settled law." Of course, first on my list to unsettle is exactly the one that Coney-Barrett testified was never to change, Marbury v Madison. As I've pointed out, if they can overturn the supreme authority, from which all of the government, including the Supreme Court derives its legitimacy, The People's Vote, then overturning them is a little thing in comparison.
That the American Constitution and the legal aparatus that grew up under it is so cumbersome and incapable of protecting even the formal, far from real democracy that we've got now is proof that it has to be drastically changed or we are doomed to a future of autocracy, the kind of autocracy that Native Americans, Black People, Women, LGBTQ+ People, generally Poor People have lived under under the U.S. Constitution and "the rule of law" such inequality and non-democracy this court is, once again, reviving as the Court did in the wake of the Civil War Amendments. Sometimes the praise for "the rule of law" "Equal Justice Under Law" (ha) needs to be looked at for the kinds of results it gets, WHO PAYS FOR IT AND WHO BENEFITS FROM IT AT THE COST OF THOSE WITHOUT WEALTH to measure those against the pretenses of those pious fictions. Anyone who thinks, after the Supreme Court, Jeb Bush Florida, John Ellis-Fox Lies putsch of 2000, the Electoral College imposition of Trump in 2016 and his attempted putsch of 2020 - we now know getting the Supreme Court involved was intrinsic to the insurrectionists planning and there is no intelligent bet as to how they'd have ruled - anyone who thinks we are safe under "the law" as it is in reality is delusional. Though I suspect saying that on MSNBC will result in it being the last time you are asked to come on - it would probably never get you onto NPR or in the NYT. I doubt even the "radical lawyers" of podcasts and Youtube channels would be entirely uncomfortable with such ideas being discussed. If the law were made truly egalitarian and democratic, they'd have to do a hell of a lot of reading and learning new legal lore. It would render a huge amount of "Constitutional Scholarship" moot.
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