CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections
on Faith and Life for the Years of Winter…
As our granddaughter
prepares to graduate from The James Madison College at Michigan State
University, it is appropriate to give Madison his props. In popular history,
when we think about the formation of American democracy and its Constitution,
the prominent names are Washington and Jefferson and Franklin. They, however,
were relatively unimportant. Washington was an aloof chair of the Continental
Congress as it wrote the Constitution. Jefferson was in France. Franklin was
old and irrelevant. It was James Madison who pushed the vision of
equality—equality before the law and equality of opportunity.
People who are opposed to
equality of opportunity, who want certain opportunities for themselves and not
for others, say that opportunity equality is an illusion. Only the tall and
fast can play in the NBA. Only the highly intelligent can be quantum
physicians. Only the brave can be astronauts. Only the skinny can be
supermodels. [1]
That, of course, is a red
herring, a false comparison. The point of Madison’s American constitutional
democracy is not sameness equality but opportunity
equality—you cannot be barred from the NBA because you are white, from
being a quantum physicist because you are a woman, from being an astronaut
because your ancestors came to America from Ireland. If you have the quicks,
the smarts, the guts, that’s all that matters, not your gender or race or
religion or national origin.
Now, though, we have a de-facto
inequality of opportunity because of the huge wealth gap.
The second equality
Madison wrote into the Constitution is before
the law. There are not separate laws for Christians and Jews, men and
women, whites and blacks. That, of course, was not true for a long time. We had
laws about who could marry whom according to race and gender, who could vote
according to race and gender, who could live in particular communities or go to
particular schools according to race and gender.
They were like the
old-time sumptuary laws, in which only people of a certain class could wear a
certain color or a particular style of clothing, so that everyone would know
who was rich and who was poor, who was “nobility” and who was “common.”
We still have de-facto
sumptuary laws because of wealth. You can’t buy a Tesla or a Mercedes if you
are a school teacher. You can’t even play golf if you don’t have a hundred
bucks [or a thousand] for the “greens fees.” But you can’t be barred from
buying a BMW because you’re of Chinese descent, or because you’re a woman.
Equality before the law
means the legal system is the same for everybody. There can’t be a law that
forbids you to walk on the beach because you’re an accountant. Or makes you sit
in the back of the bus because you’re black. There are not different laws--a
different justice--for rich and poor, black and white, Christian and atheist.
If it’s a crime, it’s a crime, regardless of who commits it.
At least that was the
vision of James Madison.
Madison was smart enough
to know that his Constitution was exactly that—a vision. It was not a reality,
and would not be until people began to realize that equality was a good thing,
for the powerful and the powerless alike.
JRMcF
1] What separates
supermodels from regular models? Supermodels don’t fall off the runway.
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