Taking Liberty

by Bruce Patterson

"As mankind becomes more liberal, they will become more able to allow that those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protection of civil government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations in examples and liberality." —George Washington: message to Catholics, 1789

"The U.S. also has its native Fascists who say they are '100%' Americans...At various times in our history we have had sorry incidences of mob sadism, lynchings, vigilantism, terror, and the suppression of civil liberties. We have had our hooded gangs, Black Legions, Silver Shirts, and racial and religious bigots. All of them, in the name of 'Americanism,' have used undemocratic methods and doctrines which experience has shown can be properly identified as 'fascist'." US Army: Army Talk, Orientation Fact Sheet 64, issued March 24th, 1945.

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I've never much cared about the Irish half of me. Can't say I've dwelt much in my Slovak half, either. When I was a baby the Slovak half of my family insisted I be baptized a Catholic and so saved from eternal damnation. Which was fine by the Irish half of my family just so long as I was never forced to go to church.

But when I was growing up I never cared about such "old world" stuff. I was an American, the mutt son of a mutt Republic born in lawless rebellion. The mothers and fathers of my country left their mark on this world by breathing new life into the ancient concept of liberty. They modernized the idea and spelled it out in language so clear that anybody could understand it. That sweet liberty was more precious than gold, even more precious than life, they took to be "Common Sense," as Tom Paine so famously put it.

That the signers of the American Declaration of Independence failed to establish liberty for most everybody living in their new Republic in no way negates the fact that they seized it for themselves. Emboldened by a powerful sense of their own "inalienable" rights, they took their fate into their own hands and they won. They not only beat the world's most powerful army, they also overthrew 1,400 years of rule by the Church. In their speeches, essays and memoirs they made it obvious that the single achievement they were most proud of was the "wall" they had erected between Church and State, between "Sacred Writ" and civil law.

As persuasive as my country's founders were, not everybody back then was anxious to throw off time-honored social custom and, more importantly, their own well worn habits of thought. The mothers and fathers of my country were revolutionaries, after all. The plain truth is that most people living in the colonies had to be dragged kicking and screaming into The Land of Liberty. And just because they'd gotten them there, the founders knew, was no guarantee they'd stay there. In other words, any mass of people who could be led into The Promised Land could just as easily be led right back out of it. And so, in their attempt to provide future generations with the ways and means of preserving and extending their liberty, the founders wrote down and, as best they could, tried to "establish" a Bill of Rights. (During the Constitutional Convention a resolution to abolish slavery failed to pass by two votes).

So long as future generations understood and held to the egalitarian and libertarian ideals upon which liberty rested, the founders were convinced, then as citizens they would be able to adequately contend against the fear mongers, rabble rousers, race baiters, war mongers, religious fanatics and 14 carat bigots who, for their own mercenary reasons, forever would be striving to steal the people's liberty. America's great "Democratic Experiment" would finally succeed because, sooner or later, "the people" would come to know where their true interests lie. Jealous of their own liberty, they would learn to watch out for the liberty of others.

Or, human nature being what it is, after the founders were dead and buried their Constitution and Bill of Rights could become just rotting sheets of antique paper, the quaint relics of a dead dream. America has always been of two minds on this subject, and every bit of reform America has gone through has been accompanied by upset and discord. And if the reform has been "big," then from out of the woodwork has always come those who warn that the sky was falling. There has always been a fanatical minority who, seeing themselves as the rightful Defenders of Public Decency, would stop at nothing in their attempts to freeze inequity, to keep all social arrangements exactly as they are. They are not genuine conservatives because American conservatives have always stood on the very constitutional principles these moral crusaders wish to subvert or abolish altogether. The main resistance to progress in American history has always come from good, old fashioned reactionaries led by demagogues — from those who FDR described as sleepwalkers who sleepwalk backward.

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Twenty years ago, I never would have thought I'd ever be coming out in support of gay marriage. To tell the truth, even today I don't care much about it because, since it doesn't materially effect me one way or the other, I figure it isn't really any of my business.

But I do care about the Constitution and I am jealous of my liberty. When the President of the United States, who swore an oath to uphold the Constitution (and not an oath to get re-elected), proposes to amend the Constitution in order deny homosexuals the equal protection of civil government, it stirs the Irish and Slovak in me. It makes me remember the time I'd spent as a "white man" experiencing Jim Crow's tender mercies. Looking at George Bush the Born Again, chest-pounding Dixiecrat blocking the schoolhouse door, I see a dangerous demagogue. I see a driver drunk with power speeding ahead with his eyes glued to the rearview mirror.

All of my adult life I've lived with reactionaries masquerading as conservatives, bigots who wrap themselves in my people's flag. It's always been open season on homosexuals — it's time we as a society admit it and it's time for us to put an end to it. To those who say the homosexuals and their allies are going about establishing their rights in the wrong way and at the wrong time, we must answer, "Who are you kidding?" Who has ever achieved liberty without taking it?

The "illegal" marriages that are occurring across the country are non-violent acts of civil disobedience that are inconveniencing no one. Like Jesus Christ, in their refusal to go along with injustice the rebels are not so much breaking the law as fulfilling its promise. In their demands for dignity and equality we hear the voices of all of the best who have came before us. Like it or not, we hear the demands of the founders.