LESSONS FROM THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS: THOUGHTS ON ST. PATRICK'S DAY

Growing up, I used to hear my Irish Catholic grandmother remind me that there are lessons to be learned from the lives of the saints. Such lessons can be applied not only to individuals, but also to nations.

Of all of the great nations of the world, America stands out as the quintessential "nation of immigrants," composed of voyagers and exiles from every one of the worlds tongues, nations, and stations; from every religion or none at all, from every zone of conflict or street of violence, from the vastnesses of continents scorched by equinoctial suns to the fringes of green and seagirt islands such as Ireland, granite-buttressed and battered by the ageless pounding of Atlantic breakers.

In a sense, every American is without exception a member of some minority group or other. To be sure, our American story has until recent years been largely identified as the history of the white settlers, primarily British and northern European, who came to what is now Virginia and the northeast. Yet in truth, our history is the history of a lengthy series of arrivals, even from that of the first peoples who arrived so many thousands of years ago across the now-drowned land bridge between Siberia and Alaska.

On Saint Patrick's day, of course, we recall the experience of the Irish in America, and rightly so, for that experience has molded the history of America and of Ireland, and has changed the lives of every Irish-American, and every Irishman.

The story of the Gael in the New World is almost a textbook example of how the contributions of a discrete and identifiable community can enlarge the American experience. We who are of Irish descent brought with us from the ancestral island a culture, a world view, a faith, and most importantly, a faculty for the written and the spoken word that has been almost without peer in the history of the English language. After all, James Joyce once asked, who but the Irish could have taken the tongue of the conqueror and made it so brilliantly their own?

Yet the one great sin against blood, faith, and heritage of which Irish-Americans can never be accused is that of being assimilated into an alien culture and entirely abandoning their own. Instead, the Irish, like so many others before and since, beginning as outsiders, integrated themselves into American society, and in so doing, influenced that society in ways both obvious and subtle. Even the Famine Irish, who fled the Potato Famine of the 1840s, and were often the poorest of the poor and the rudest of the rude, came as members of a culture that, though often dormant under English occupation, possessed and possesses still an ancient and noble heritage. And without the leavening and the gifts of the Irish and of their culture, our own American culture would be perceptibly poorer.

On the Feast of Saint Patrick, then, all of us may profit from the example of the Irish in America, not out of simple nostalgia, or even from mere pride of ancestry (if, dear reader, you happen, like yours truly, to be of Irish descent), but rather because the Irish have been our teachers, from whose achievements and history in this country we may take instruction and inspiration. For against the Irish immigrants, particularly the Famine Irish, were ranged many of the most powerful social and political forces of the day, united in fear and dislike of a proud but primitive people from a different culture, of a Roman Catholic people in a Protestant republic, of a communitarian people in a land of rugged individualists, and of poor people in a society just beginning to come to terms with the potentialities of staggering wealth. Why, the nativist element demanded, did we have to admit the Irish at all? And if we had to let them in, why couldn't the Irish just be assimilated until they adopted the faith and culture of the Protestant population? Against such an initial background, the history of the Irish community in this country was for some time a history of initial rejection, a history of anti-Irish and anti-Catholic bigotry and fear In the longer term, however, the history of the Irish in America has been a history of slow, steady surmounting of barriers, a history of building bridges, paying dues, and establishing bona fides, a history, in short, of integration.

Yet such a history is decades in the making, and true integration is the accomplishment of generations. For Irish-Americans, the struggle to secure equal rights was in many ways closely parallel to the struggles waged by other minority groups over the years. In that regard, the experience of the Irish is certainly not unique, but it is instructive.

And to the extent that we still struggle to recognize that those who may differ from us are nevertheless our fellow Americans, and just as entitled as we are to a place at the table in the commonwealth, and that we may profitably take the blueprint for the social and political integration of all Americans, of whatever creed, color, gender, orientation, or place of origin, from the Irish. For as the Irish demonstrated, participation in the life of the larger community leads to habituation; habituation leads to accommodation; accommodation leads to toleration, and toleration leads to acceptance and integration. When integration happens, barriers fall and hitherto separate cultures or subcultures can teach and learn from one another, and can enrich one another, fulfilling the American promise and making this nation stronger for it.

This, then, is the lesson for St. Patrick’s day.

FOR OUR OWN SAFETY'S SAKE: WHY IT IS IN EVERYBODY’S WELL-CONSIDERED INTEREST FOR CALIFORNIA’S SUPREME COURT TO CONSIGN PROPOSITION 8 TO THE ROUNDFILE.

Today's Palm Springs Desert Sun editorialized today urging the California Supreme Court to overturn Proposition 8. In three paragraphs appearing in various parts of its editorial, The Desert Sun nailed the issue.

The editorial notes that “Proposition 8, the voter-approved initiative to ban same-sex marriages, only serves to allow the fundamental constitutional rights of one group of people to be stripped away by a majority vote.”

“If,” the editorial goes on to warn, “Proposition 8 stands, it will set a bad precedent and could endanger the rights of other groups. This is an issue that is more about how the law is applied than about marriage. The California Supreme Court must ensure equal protection of its residents under the law.”

Finally, the editorial points out a critical truth about equality before the law: “We don't have true civil rights if some of us aren't entitled to them.”

The hardest, truest test of a democracy is not how well it takes care of those who are in the majority, but how well it accommodates those who may be in the unpopular, dissenting, or disliked minority. This is true whether we are speaking of the rights of the religious dissenter, the immigrant, the political opponent, or the GLBT person.

That was the prime reason a constituent, a self-identified “cultural conservative of color,” gave me to explain having voted against Proposition 8. Now I know this constituent thinks my sexual orientation is not “normal” or “moral,” and that the constituent entertains a “yuck factor” about what LGBT people “do in bed,” yet this constituent also understands one political reality very well: “If they can come after you today, they can come after us tomorrow.”

That’s well-considered self interest at work.

And well-considered self-interest is at the core of how any democratic republic works. James Madison understood that perfectly. That’s why the U.S. Constitution he was instrumental in drafting has stood up so well across more than two centuries of national growth, civil and foreign wars, and vast social change.

Of course, supporters of Proposition 8 have tried to couch the discussion in “moral” terms, about “protecting” families from the presumptively immoral inroads of GLBT people into the “sacred” institution of marriage, which -in their view- is either too fragile to be allowed to LGBT people, or so sacred that it has to be reserved to straight folks.

But somewhere along the line, the proponents of Proposition 8 forgot a fundamental reality: in America, every single one of us is in some kind of minority, whether racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, or other (southpaws take note), and thus in potential danger from the majority. In such a disparate society, our own well-considered self-interest ought to restrain us from legislation that targets the civil rights of groups we may not like lest our own group become targets of the next wave of scapegoating or wedge-issue politics. As Benjamin Franklin put it, “we must hang together, or we shall surely hang separately.”

We’ve seen scapegoating, discrimination, and wedge issue politics happen before.

Our own Californian history demonstrates a disturbing willingness on the part of California voters to write bigotry and discrimination into the Constitution or laws of the Golden State. Virtually without exception, these laws have had to be overturned by the courts:

● In 1879, the framers of our State Constitution included a prohibition against Chinese being employed.

● The 1913 Alien Land Act, aimed at Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and subcontinental Indians, prohibited them from owning land.

● Proposition 14 (1964), which would written into California’s constitution a right of racial discrimination in housing.

● Proposition 187, ostensibly directed against illegal immigrants, but widely perceived as targeting California’s Latino community.

In each of these cases, California cast aside the better angels of its nature, cutting a great swath through the constitution in order to diminish the rights of unpopular minorities.

Proposition 8 supporters seek to cut a similar swath through the constitution to diminish the rights of LGBT people much as, in Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons, one of the characters declares his willingness to “cut down every law in England to get at the devil.”

In a devastating rebuke, the play’s protagonist, Sir Thomas More, asks:

"What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? ... And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you - where would you hide, ... the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's, and if you cut them down ... do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!"

Perhaps an extreme formulation, but it aptly encapsulates the importance of cleaving to the rule of law in the face of the easy temptation to misuse the law for selfish ends, or to do harm to others in the service of a particular viewpoint or ideology.

The freedom of all of us is a function of the freedom of one. One may not support same-gender marriage per se, yet still understand that Proposition 8 is a bad idea. One may have that “yuck factor” about what GLBT people do together, yet still believe society as a whole is endangered by writing overt discrimination of any kind into law.

In our conversation, my socially conservative constituent of color happened to mention the famous “I didn’t speak up” poem, which has become so much a part of our culture that many quote it without even knowing its source. It comes from Pastor Martin Niemöller, the courageous German Lutheran clergyman (and sometime World War I U-Boat commander) who dared to stand up to Hitler:

"In Germany, they came first for the Communists,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist;

And then they came for the trade unionists,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist;

And then they came for the Jews,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew;

And then . . . they came for me . . .
And by that time there was no one left to speak up."

“If,” my constituent asked, “I don’t speak up for you when they try to take away your rights, how can I hope you’ll speak up for me if they try to take away my civil rights?”

So, I concur with the Desert Sun. The Supreme Court should strike down Proposition 8, for all our safety’s sake.