age and outrage

 

Supreme Court draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade published by Politico

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Remember how long thou hast been putting off these things, and how often thou hast received an opportunity from the gods, and yet dost not use it. Thou must now at last perceive of what universe thou art a part, and of what administrator of the universe thy existence is an efflux, and that a limit of time is fixed for thee, which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind, it will go and thou wilt go, and it will never return. 

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JONATHAN TURLEY: What is clear is that what occurred with this leak was an unspeakably unethical act, and it is unfortunately a sign of our times. We're living in an age of rage where nothing seems inviolate anymore, no principles seems sacred, and it makes some of us feel almost naive. Even though this is a city that floats on a rolling sea of leaks, the court was always an island of integrity, and most of us didn't think this day would come. And I'm not too sure why. Maybe it's because we let hope triumph over experience. 

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The oldest person alive is Sister André, a French woman, born in 1904. An honor for her, a nun since 1940, enjoying chocolate and a glass of wine a day. I'm reminded of another World's Oldest Person some years ago who attributed her longevity to drinking a cup of olive oil every day. I can do the glass of red wine a day, but if you've ever eaten too much fried mullet roe at one sitting, you understand my astonishment at a cup of olive oil a day. Anyway, the book I'm reading at the moment is "Galileo's Daughter" about Virginia, his eldest, also a nun, who took the name Maria Celeste, the Celeste to honor her father's fascination with the heavens. 

Galileo Galilei, a double name that seems odd to us but that followed an Italian custom in those days of giving the first-born son a given name devised from the family surname. My fascination with Galileo is his struggle with the Church that he honored and loved, that condemned him for his science that contradicted Church doctrine. Galileo tried hard to accommodate himself to the Church that had dogmatized the results of innocent ignorance, watching the sun rise and set, into nonsense, stupid doctrine, and made taking issue with it a capital offense. Not so totally his brilliance as an astronomer, I am thankful to live in a place and Time when I cannot be significantly disciplined by the Church for calling nonsense if/when I see it, is the foundation of my admiration for Galileo.

And so the big news last night and this morning, the Supreme Court reveal. Oh, the outrage. On the American left the outrage is that the Court is about to overturn Roe v. Wade and return the power and authority regarding abortions to the States, where abortion rights will be curtailed. On the American right the outrage is that someone leaked information from the Court's high integrity tradition of confidentiality. If the situation were reversed, the outrages would be reversed. 

Notwithstanding my reading Marcus Aurelius to insist that I choose which universe I belong to, I'm not concerned with leaks in government, ours or any other, and I do have an opinion on the abortion issue; but it's an issue on which conviction on both sides includes people of such honor and integrity, including many friends and people I dearly love on both sides, that I am back to my base position of despising certainty in myself, and remembering my theology professor's counsel that they may be right and I may be wrong. 

For myself then, contemning all government as always all bad, bitterly detesting government that presumes to make people's decisions for them, the moral principle of individual and especially women's rights on one side, versus the other side's moral outrage at what is condemned as murder of the most innocent creatures under Heaven.

If you are absolutely certain of your morally correct position on the issue, I pray for you the ἀγάπη to pause and contemplate that half of Americans are morally certain that you are wrong; as you may well be.

So then Marcus, philosopher emperor, his book of wisdom, pressing me to speak up, that it's now or never, which at my age is a possibility, even probability, at every moment of life. Lines in our banished hymn from James Russell Lowell's poem "The Present Crisis", "Offering each the bloom or blight, And that choice goes by for ever, twixt that darkness and that light". Some issues I am confident enough to assert my certainty, including calling religious nonsense when I see it; some issues, even though I have a firm opinion but can see both universes so clearly that I fence-sit. 

Russia, Putin's war of aggression on Ukraine, the evil is so egregious as in my mind to warrant the all out obliteration that in my lifetime brought Germany and Japan down; but that innocents would die and suffer by our doing. What, when the cost of stopping evil is even greater evil?

War, mutual nuclear obliteration, Supreme Court decisions, angry protests, red v blue, authoritarianism v ballot. I'm remembering a 1943 newsreel of the speech when Goebbels asked, "Do you want total war? If necessary, do you want a war more total and radical than anything that we can imagine today?", stirring his massive audience to a cheering, wild-eyed standing ovation.

No, I think not. I don't even appreciate that we Americans are divided. What about me, clearing away the clouds from my mind? I hear loud noise, the roar of U S Air Force jets flying directly overhead, so get up and go outside to look, only to discover that the loud roaring noise was the sound of the washing machine emptying. 

IDK

T 

Church reaffirms commitment to reproductive rights as Supreme Court looks poised to overturn Roe v. Wade
By David Paulsen
“As Episcopalians, we have a particular obligation to stand against Christians who seek to destroy our multicultural democracy and recast the United States as an idol to the cruel and distorted Christianity they advocate,” the Rev. Gay Clark Jennings, House of Deputies president, said in reaction to the news.