A MORE PERFECT UNION:

Fourth of July thoughts on freedom and the “not yet.”

A street sign I saw today in Port St. Joe, FL where I am spending this 4th of July with my family.

Preamble

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

On this Independence Day, 2022, I am feeling grateful for those words. I love the U.S. Constitution and the freedom it allows for. I love this country. I am blessed to live in America.

And yet.

And yet, I’m feeling conflicted this year because of the recent SCOTUS overturning of Roe vs. Wade. For the first time in my entire life, I’m feeling like the "Blessings of Liberty" promised in this revered document don’t extend to me.

(*Here I want to note that there are many in this country who feel that way for far deeper reasons. I want to acknowledge that this post is not in any way a comparison to the very real and continued struggles people experience at the hands of institutionalized racism and inequality on a daily basis. What I am trying to do with this post, is work through my own feelings about the state of our nation when it comes to gender equality, specifically.)

The truth is, rights didn’t extend to women in the original document at all. The Constitution was written in 1787, in order to protect basic rights and liberties for its citizens. But not all its citizens, of course.

The Constitution was produced during a time when black people didn’t have equal protection under the law, that didn’t come until 1868 (and of course, it was not truly established for a very long time, and a valid and good argument can be made it still is not. Not yet.)

Black men didn’t have the right to vote until 1870. Women did not have the right to vote until the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920. By the way, women were not even mentioned in the Constitution, although later revisions have corrected that.

And here’s the kicker for me: The Equal Rights Amendment was proposed in 1923. Know when it finally passed? Nearly 50 years later. It was not until 1972 that this nation’s Congress passed a law stating that, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”

Equality of rights under the law. Something that should be a given, a natural born right.

And yet.

According to the 2020 Global Gender Gap Report from the World Economic Forum (which ranks progress toward equality in 153 countries around the world), the U.S. is in 53rd place. The areas they look at are educational attainment, health and survival, economic participation and opportunity, and political empowerment. That means there are 52 other countries in the world where women have better access to those things. (https://www.brookings.edu/essay/100-years-on-politics-is-where-the-u-s-lags-most-on-gender-equality/).

In brighter news, the WE Forum did find that as of 2022, America saw more female CEO’s of Fortune 500 companies than ever.

And yet.

“Yet, the new high still only translates to around 15 percent female representation at the top of the country's biggest public businesses.” 85 percent of the business world leaders are men. (https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/03/ceos-fortune-500-companies-female/)

This trend extends to politics as well. “Fifty-six of the 146 nations (38%) studied by the World Economic Forum in 2014 and 2016 have had a female head of government or state for at least one year in the past half-century.” (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/03/08/women-leaders-around-the-world/).

Right now, America has 24 women in the Senate (out of 100) and 123 women in the House (out of 435). And America has had exactly 0 female presidents.

And on the issue of abortion, most industrialized countries allow the procedure without restriction. But America is trending in the opposite direction.

Men, can I ask you something? If these numbers were reversed, if there had never been a male president, if they were ALL female, and if men only made up 28% of the House, would you feel this country was fair? If you had a right to make decisions about your own body taken from you by the government, would you feel like you had equal protection under the law? Would you feel that you lived in a just society?

My intention is not to say I hate America, or give a history lesson, or to give some kind of exhaustive account of all the groups of people who have not enjoyed equality throughout the course of America’s complicated past. Because let’s be honest: despite all its shortcomings and failures, despite the lack of justice that still plagues our institutions and laws, despite the fact that the “promotion of general Welfare” is not truly promoted for everyone… I still would not want to live anywhere else.

When I look around the world and I see 53 migrants who died in a truck trying to get into this country from Mexico…when I see the Ukrainian president pleading with Americans for help to defend their country against Russia, just so they can keep their country in tact…when I see refugees seeking asylum from Sudan, Afghanistan, and Syria, just to name a few…and when I see war tearing apart Ethiopia from the inside out….I realize that I am so lucky to live in America. I am crystal clear that I live in the greatest country.

And yet.

And yet there is much work to be done.

What I am trying to work through here is that I believe we are living in what New Testament scholar and historian NT Wright calls the “now” and “not yet.”

Jesus came on the scene during a time period where some people were being persecuted and imprisoned and enslaved. There was no protection for the poor, widows, immigrants, slaves, women, or children. Jesus brought a message of freedom for all people, and that all were welcome to become part of the Kingdom of God. Can you see why that message of freedom would have been especially attractive to those groups of people?

But, true transformation of people, much less the world, will not and cannot happen overnight. And so we are in the in-between.

And yet!

The Kingdom of God is available to all right now, we can live our lives differently today. We can experience freedom and joy and meaning and purpose in the now. We can live our lives on earth as it is in the heavens. And there are things we can do better to live more like that today. Striving endlessly for equality for everyone is one thing we must not grow weary of doing.

And so, we are still struggling to form that more perfect union. While that arc MLK so beautifully prophesied about is indeed bending toward justice, it has a ways to go. Thank God it’s not a plateau of justice, and I believe the arc is still bending. It will not ever reach it’s final destination, it will never be perfect.

MLK did not talk about a perfect society, just a more just one.

But my faith tells me that someday this earth will be made right, like it was in the Garden, when God walked with Adam and Eve in the cool of the day. That day is coming.

Just not yet.

Me at the beach on July 4th. Celebrating Independence and exercising my first amendment right 😏