Heart of a Stranger vs. Heart of Stone

In May, 2018 I wrote the following in my blog:

Trump’s Washington is a political black hole whose denseness does not allow light to escape—or compassion to be released. (1)

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This past Tuesday, at the post-Inauguration Day interfaith ceremony at Washington National Cathedral, the Right Rev. Mariann Budde, the Episcopal Bishop of Washington, gave a sermon directed at newly-sworn-in President Trump asking him,

“In the name of our God, . . . to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.”

Budde's plea mentioned “gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and Independent families,” across the country “who fear for their lives.” 

The bishop also spoke up for immigrant workers, including those who may not “have the proper documentation,” saying the vast majority of them are “not criminals” but rather “good neighbors.” (2)

She added:

“And that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here. Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were all once strangers in this land.”

The plea for compassion, “for we were all once strangers in this land,” should be particularly meaningful to Jews, who, Rabbi David Russo explains, 

 

are consistently reminded of our obligation to take care of those around us, to raise our voices in the face of oppression and to treat everyone as we would want to be treated ourselves. Far from exempting us from this special responsibility, the Jewish people’s history of hardship is exactly the reason why we are called upon to show chesed, lovingkindness, to immigrants in our midst. As the Torah says, we know the heart of the stranger, because we were once strangers in the land of Egypt. (3)

And what was Trump’s trenchant response to the sermon? As expected, he reached into his fifth-grade lexicon and came up with “nasty.”

Trump was supported by his MAGidiots, chief among whom was Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.): “The person giving this sermon should be added to the deportation list.” (4) (Where do you deport someone who was born in New Jersey?)

The statement by Collins falls in line with the lack of Constitutional awareness that afflicts TrumpWorld. In the past, Trump himself spouted such anti-Constitutional craziness as wishing to see Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley executed. Trump wrote that

Mark Milley’s phone call to reassure China in the aftermath of the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, was “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH.” (5)

As of 2019, according to Axios, Trump had accused 24 persons of “treason.” (6)

And he continued after that, the following year tweeting that

a statement by a Black Lives Matter chapter leader made during an interview with Fox News was “Treason, Sedition, Insurrection!”

That was just days after Trump became the first president in modern U.S. history to accuse his predecessor of treason.

“It’s treason,” Trump said during a Monday interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network. “They were spying on my campaign, I told you that a long time ago. It turns out I was right.” (7)

One would think that the person serving as President of the United States would know the Constitution of this land: 

Article III, Section 3, Clause 1: Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.

Trump, of course, would eliminate the word “only” and add “or offending the amour-propre of the President.”

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(1) https://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2018/05/black-holes.html

(2) https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2025/01/22/what-did-the-bishop-say-to-trump-during-prayer-service-heres-the-full-transcript/

(3) https://journeys.uscj.org/strangers-in-land-of-egypt/

(4) https://www.yahoo.com/news/gop-member-wants-bishop-added-224103604.html

(5) https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/trump-milley-execution-incitement-violence/675435/

(6) https://www.axios.com/2019/06/16/trump-treason-russia-investigation-new-york-times

(7) https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/05/27/president-who-cries-treason/

 

Helicopterum

On February 14, 1959 Pope John XXIII greeted the landing of an American aircraft at Vatican City. He bestowed a Latin blessing upon the “helicopterum,” a locution invented for the occasion. The new word had to be invented because, obviously, when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, he did not do so in the seat of a Sikorsky.

As L.P. Hartley famously wrote in his 1953 novel The Go-Between, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” We are separated from the past, but the past is separated from us. Many changes—of thought, of dress, of language, of behavior—have occurred between then and now. The need to introduce into a language of the past of a word defining an object of the present is just one indication of the gap between then and now.

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I find it hard to write today about the disastrous opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. I choke in my craw thinking about the rock-headed stupidity of his argument, but even more so worrying about the future consequences of the decision. 

As Jeremy Stahl points out at slate.com,* 

[I]t’s clear that Alito lays down the future groundwork for overturning any number of “fundamental” rights that purportedly do not have grounding “in our Nation’s history.”

Further,

[f]or good measure, Alito lets us know which other rights were not “mentioned in the Constitution” or allegedly grounded in our nation’s history: interracial marriage, contraception, the right not to be nonconsensually sterilized, the right to reside with relatives, the right to make decisions about your children’s education, the “right to engage in consensual” and private “same-sex intimacy,” and the right to same sex marriage, just to name a few.

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Here are two ways to look at the stupidity behind Alito’s thinking:

First, Jill Lepore at newyorker.com** reminds us that there were no women involved in the creation of the United States Constitution. Lepore notes that Alito seems somewhat surprised “that there is so little written about abortion in a four-thousand-word document crafted by fifty-five men in 1787.” But there was also nothing at all mentioned, Lepore states, 

in that document, which sets out fundamental law, about pregnancy, uteruses, vaginas, fetuses, placentas, menstrual blood, breasts, or breast milk. There is nothing in that document about women at all.

Applying “the history test,” Lepore says, 

disadvantages people who were not enfranchised at the time the Constitution was written, or who have been poorly enfranchised since then.

If the past is a foreign country to us in the present, the present (and all that has occurred since a particular past time) is a foreign country to that past.

Second, my thinking.

Two weeks ago I bought a two-pound bag of onions at the supermarket for $1.49. A day or so later, the weekly circular of a different store advertised an up-coming special price of $.99 for a three-pound bag. What to think? Was I being cheated in some way? Not at all. Like all human beings, I am temporally-bound, subject to the circumstances of the present moment. Short of miraculously obtaining a crystal ball, there was no way I could know what price onions would sell at the following week. I made my purchase based on the knowledge at hand—which is all we can do. Argumentum ad futuram is a logical fallacy.

Similarly, an argument based on the past—which allows for no development or change in human circumstances—is a fallacy. “Because we did it this way, you must always do it this way” is the argument of a hide-bound fool.

Helicopters didn’t exist at the time of the drafting of the Constitution, neither did the internet, or open-heart surgery, or the National Football League—and so on and so forth. Therefore, the framers of the Constitution could not incorporate in that major American document their ideas about those things—should they be allowed or banned, for example. The framers specified the major outstanding freedoms that were contested at the time. They would have had to be clairvoyants to know what freedoms would arise in the future and need to be protected. Perhaps they also relied on an understanding of the famous words of the Declaration of Independence: we are endowed with “unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,”*** thinking it would not be necessary to go further into enumerating freedoms. 

It is a (dangerous) fool’s argument to ignore the demands of the present. And to imagine that all “unalienable Rights” could and need be specified in a single document. 

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*  https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/05/the-most-extreme-lines-from-justice-samuel-alitos-leaked-opinion-on-roe.html

**  https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/why-there-are-no-women-in-the-constitution

***  See https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/05/supreme-court-draft-abortion-leak-roe-overturned-explained.html in which Mark Joseph Stern discusses, among other issues, “‘unenumerated rights’ that lack deep roots in American history.”