October 2003

Leadership, of a Sort

by Lindsay Thompson, Bar News Editor

Ignorance is the parent of fear.

—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as the result of animal spirits—a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.

—John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory (1936)

Born and raised a Southerner, I have a high tolerance for religious enthusiasms. I've seen snake-handlers, dirt eaters, tent revivalists of all stripes (tents and revivalists), even some charismatic Episcopalians who took up in an abandoned gas station to roll in the aisles and speak in tongues. My own history is pedestrian. I was raised a Presbyterian. In the South, I was once told, that's a Baptist who can read.
 
Southerners take their religion seriously.
 
I have to admit, though, I've never seen anything quite like Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, he of the 5,280-pound monument to the Ten Commandments and other Christian edicts. Installed by him two years ago and more lately removed from Alabama's Judicial Building by some maintenance men and a federal court order, "Roy's Rock" picked up where gay marriage left off as the late-summer cause célèbre.   

Chief Justice Moore says God is the fount of American law. He thought the court and public needed a conspicuous reminder of that central fact (in a similar vein, someone in one of my childhood hometowns bought billboard space for the message, "Raeford, don't make me come down there. Signed, God"). When a federal judge told the chief justice he'd strayed a ways across the church-state line, the chief justice rolled out some states'-rights arguments I hadn't heard since the 1960s. After his claiming he was exempt from compliance with federal court orders didn't get much traction, he invoked Martin Luther King Jr. and said he was doing God's work. Big rallies began to occur outside his office, with folks shouting his praises and hurling some pretty un-Christian-sounding epithets at his foes. Rev. Jerry Falwell appeared at one rally and allowed as how if the chief justice was carrying out God's will, that trumps mortal law every time. The overall effect has been a lot like the reaction after the Supreme Court barred prayer in schools in the sixties, when "Impeach Earl Warren" billboards sprang up like Bermuda grass across the South.
 
I have no doubt Chief Justice Moore, and his followers who angrily prostrated themselves on the courthouse steps, believe passionately that religion should not be banished from the public square, but I'm not sure it needs to be the hall monitor, safety patrol, and homeroom teacher either. How exactly does one make a theocracy work in a nation at war to topple them abroad?
 
Moreover, erecting a graven image to a set of rules that says thou shalt not set up graven images seems like something Chief Justice Moore would have thought through. Eight of the Ten Commandments address private conduct; taken as a whole, they aren't much of a structure for a civil legal system. 
 
Defiance is a pose Southern politicians strike with authority, if not always with any lasting effect. Chief Justice Moore has struck a chord with the sort of people who see no inconsistency between the Commandments, the death penalty, wartime service (Chief Justice Moore fought in Vietnam), impounding and killing homosexuals (something he suggested in a parenting case a while back), or the occasional coveting of your neighbor's ox and/or wife. He is widely tipped as a standout candidate for governor.
 
Being a Southerner is a Manichean state of existence. You're always either denying everything or denying nothing. (Lawyering can be like that, too.) Appeals to the animal spirits, in politics or law, can approach the border beyond which irrationality lies. You can't always stop what you set in motion. It will be interesting to see how Chief Justice Moore's long summer of his discontent will turn out.
 
Whose fault is this mess? A little bit of everyone's. The media elevated the comic side of the story—you never come off badly making fun of the South—to the detriment of any kind of thoughtful discussion of the real issues. The federal courts have contributed to the public confusion in no small measure by developing a test for what's acceptable religious expression in the public square that elevates hairsplitting to an art form. The law in the area has become a lot like the Bible: no matter your point of view, you can find something in it to support your position. And there are private actors in all such controversies, eager to leap into the fray and make headlines for themselves. Ahh, democracy. Nothing quite like it.
 
What a long, strange trip 2003 is proving to be.

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