Imagine a world without opinions

Each week my hometown newspaper, The Laramie Boomerang, conducts an online opinion poll. It asks the opinion of readers about an important issue of the day. People can log in and let the community know what they think. And many do. A few days later, the newspaper fills us in on what our neighbors think.

What is curious to me are those who take their time to log in to let the community know “I have no opinion on the matter.” Almost every week there are those who want us to know that about them.

Think about it for a moment. These are not folks who are stopped on the street and surprised when a reporter shoves a microphone in their face and, without warning, asks them what they think about an issue.

These folks actually take time to log onto the newspaper’s website. They read the question. They look at the options and intentionally choose to say, “I have no opinion on the matter.”

People like me thrive on opinion. Everyone has an opinion. Right? Opinions are ubiquitous. Plato thought that opinions are the “medium between knowledge and ignorance.” In a democracy, is having one not an expectation? Sharing our opinions and testing them in the public arena is what makes our system work. Right?

Maybe having an opinion on everything is not all it’s cracked up to be.

“Opinion” is a Middle Ages term arising from Latin the “opinionem,” used to refer to conjecture or belief. More helpful is that the word emanates from the stem “opinari,” which connotes thinking, judging, or choosing.

So, those without an opinion are telling the rest of that they choose not to choose.

Still, I’m not sure what to make of these folks. Maybe it’s just their way of yawning or shrugging their shoulders. On the other hand, they’re not saying, “I don’t care.” They are simply admitting that, at this moment, they “have no opinion on the matter.”

Perhaps, however, it is a satirical response. Satire involves the use of irony or exaggeration to expose and criticize the stupidity of others, especially in the context of contemporary politics. That starts to make sense if we consider Gore Vidal’s assertion that public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation, and prejudice.

It would take an intellectual like Vidal with his patrician manner and, what one of his biographers called, “epigrammatic wit” to figure out the motives of those who, in the context of a world where opinions are ubiquitous, claim they have none. Epigrammatic is a definitional description of Vidal’s memorable, satirical sayings, which for the sake of this essay means, it takes a satirist to know one.

Those without an opinion watch quietly as the rest of the world seems to demand opinion of everyone, even though some, as John F. Kennedy observed, enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought. So, maybe asserting they have no opinion is a subtle, but satirical way of laughing at the rest of us who have an opinion about everything, whether we know enough to have formed that opinion or not.

Maybe, these respondents who say, “I have no opinion,” are really not saying, “I have no opinion.” Maybe they are judging the rest of us, saying, “Having an opinion on everything is the hobgoblin of ego.” And they don’t want to play that game.

We must ask, “Where would the world be without opinion?” How could we begin to speak of Trump, climate change, pineapple on pizza, or how others should rear their children without those who traffic in opinion. A world without opinion would witness the end of talk radio and cable news. Letter-to-the-editor writers would be idled. Pollsters would go broke. Columnists would be assigned to the ash heap of history.

Voters would be left adrift trying to figure out what they are thinking.

At the end of the day, shouldn’t everyone have an opinion? About that weighty matter, I’m sorry. I have no opinion.

In exchange for Roe v Wade

America’s first Civil War lasted four years, contrasted with our second, now entering a 47^th year. The first pitted Southern slaveholders against Northern abolitionists. The second divided people of good faith between what the activists call “pro-life” and “pro-choice.”

On January 22, it will be 46 years since the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade. Soon Roe may well be reversed, at least temporarily. Anyone who believes its reversal will end abortion has no recollection of the times that preceded the 1973 Supreme Court decision. Significantly, for a nation whose laws are based in considerable part on English common law, the criminalization of abortion did not have its roots in that source of American law.

The first U.S. laws criminalizing abortion were not enacted until Connecticut in 1821. A century and a half later came Roe v. Wade. Many people thought that had ended the war, but the court’s decision was only one more battle.

The 46-year-old war is not without casualties. Pro-lifers count what they say are millions of unborn children whose lives have been taken through abortion. Pro-choice advocates point to the murders of doctors and bombing of clinics by pro-life extremists.

Holy scripture has been a casualty, weaponized by pro-life extremists. They tortured parts of the Bible never meant to say anything about abortion, e.g. Psalms 139:13, “You knit me together in my mother’s womb.” All the while, they ignore God’s commandment to send an unfaithful wife to the priest where he would expose her to abortion. (Numbers 5)

The battle over reproductive rights also compromised the theological ethics of conservative Christians who made their peace with the most corrupt, immoral president in history because he was their last, best hope to ending Roe v. Wade.

As a direct result, the next generation will be plagued by ultra-conservative judges at every level of the judiciary who owe their enormous power to this one issue. The pro-life agenda was about courts overturning Roe. Decisions made by these extremist judges will hit that target, while causing collateral damage to the rights of working people, the environment, consumer protection, and civil rights.

This war also levied ethical costs on pro-choice advocates. Many were forced into a Faustian bargain, ignoring what most quietly believe, i.e. life begins at conception, in favor of an individual’s vaguely constitutional right to choose.

Ending this war requires imaginative thinking and rational compromises on both sides.

A Nobel peace prize awaits she or he who can negotiate an end to this struggle. Know however, it will never end so long as each side relies on courts or politicians to fight their battles. All such victories will be temporary, serving only to further incite the soldiers on both sides. It’s people of good faith who must negotiate the war’s end, focusing on life; not just the life of the fetus but the life of the child.

The basis for using the Bible a weapon in the current battle is questionable, ambiguous at best, non-existent without stretching. However, the scriptural basis for assuring that a society care for its children is unequivocal.

So, what would it take to end the war and save America from the ravages of single-issue agendas? What compromises is each side willing to make?  

I am pro-choice and if advocates named me their negotiator, here’s what I’d do. I’d exchange Roe for quality of life commitments that would assure pregnant mothers that the community cares as much for her life and the life of her child as it does for the fetus.

That compromise would demand guaranteed healthcare for all, livable wages for working families, eliminating gender-wage disparity, affordable, safe housing, quality childcare, early childhood education, adequate mental health services, access to affordable contraceptives, paid maternity leave, well-funded elementary and secondary education, and a free post high school education for every young person.

Expensive? Yes. Affordable? Absolutely, with adjustments to American priorities. Worth it? That depends on the value you put on the lives of our children, born and unborn.

Blessing the ACLU and Juntos

This morning, as we remember Martin Luther King, Jr., it occurs to me that Dr. King might like us to do more than remember what he did. He might like us to uphold those who are, 50 years later, doing what he taught.

This morning we give truth to words Jesus spoke in his Sermon on the Mount. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for what is right: they shall have their fill.”  We celebrate the life, the death and the eternal teachings of the Rev. Martin Luther King by blessing the bold, courageous work of the American Civil Liberties Union and JUNTOS.

An El Salvadoran priest once said humans cannot be divided between believers and non-believers but between those who support an unjust society and those who struggle for justice. Today we bless the work of those who struggle for justice.  

Among those who call themselves “believers” are Christians who like to speak about Jesus but get nervous when others start speaking like Jesus. It is not my intent in blessing the work of the ACLU and JUNTOS to identify them with any religious beliefs. They are not motivated by scripture but by the words of the US Constitution. Still their thirst for justice identifies them with the same longings of the poor, the meek, and those who weep, as Jesus encouraged in those of us who are motivated by his teachings.

While their good works are secular and arise from the law and ours arise from the Gospel, it is, none the less, right to give thanks for the intersection between our work and theirs and recognize the courage they demonstrate fighting the battles alongside we who seek to follow Jesus. This solidarity is, in itself, a profound form of social justice.

Introduce Sabrina King and Antonio Serrano

Theologian John Dear spent his life in the struggle we share with JUNTOS and the ACLU, a struggle against the injustice of the world. John Dear writes about the word justice in the Sermon on the Mount.

Justice is not the private practice of doing good, he said, but the global responsibility of the community to assure every human being has what they need, that everyone pursues justice for every one, and that all live in right relationship with one another, with creation, and with God.

Our belief in Jesus is measured by our devotion to seeking justice. This morning we find ourselves celebrating the birth of one of God’s great prophets, Martin Luther King, with the reading of the parable of the unjust judge or, as I call it “the blessing of persistence.”

Jesus told them a parable to make the point that they ought never lose heart. “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor respected man. And there was a widow in that city who kept coming, persistently demanding justice against her oppressor. For a while he refused. Eventually he decided, ‘Though I neither fear God nor respect man, because this widow keeps bothering me, I’ll give her justice, so she will not beat me down by her continual hammering on my desk.’

The Lord said, “Hear what the unrighteous judge says. And ask your selves, “will not God give justice those who cry to him day and night? I tell you, that is what is necessary to find justice in an unjust world.”

Listen carefully to this judge. He isn’t won over to God; he has no love for God. His decision to grant justice has nothing to do with any new-found respect for others. He’s just tired of being pestered and he’s worried about his reputation; giving in to this poor widow will look better to the community than using the law to beat her over the head.

Justice always looks better than injustice. Justice is Biblical. So then, why is it so rare that Jesus blesses those who hunger for justice?

This morning, on the anniversary of the birth of one of God’s great peacemakers, we gather to bless the work of the American Civil Liberties Union and JUNTOS as an expression of our gratitude for their hunger for justice in our land.

JUNTOS describes its struggle for justice this way.

“We have seen and felt injustice in our state and country. We have watched our brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, sons and daughters, treated like outcasts and criminals. We have seen our relatives locked up for no crime other than freely seeking a better life. We will not stand by while our families are being torn apart.”

JUNTOS partnered with Highlands, the ACLU, and the faith community in last year’s Good Friday prayer vigil and march for justice for immigrant families and DACA kids.

The ACLU has a long and storied history of seeking justice. In 1920, its first year, the ACLU championed justice for citizens targeted for deportation, including politically radical immigrants. They supported trade unionists’ right to organize, and secured the release of hundreds of activists imprisoned for expressing antiwar opinions.

When biology teacher John T. Scopes was charged in 1925 with violating a Tennessee ban on the teaching of evolution, the ACLU was there and secured celebrated attorney Clarence Darrow for his defense.

Eighty years after the Scopes Trial, the ACLU challenged a Pennsylvania requirement, based on an unjust and literal interpretation of scripture, that high school biology classes teach "intelligent design" alongside evolution. The judge ruled that "intelligent design" is not science and laws mandating its teaching violated the First Amendment.

In 1942, the ACLU stood almost alone in denouncing the federal government's internment of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans in concentration camps during WWII. The ACLU’s thirst for justice brought about the desegregation of America's schools through Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. The ACLU helped end the ban on interracial marriage in a case called Virginia v. Loving

Frontiero v. Richardson was the first case ACLU attorney Ruth Bader Ginsburg argued before the Supreme Court. It was 1973 when Ginsburg argued gender shouldn’t be a basis for discrimination any more than race.  “Because a person’s skin color bears no necessary relationship to ability,” she told the Supreme Court. “a person’s sex bears no necessary relationship to ability.”

In 2015, after decades of effort, the ACLU won a landmark Supreme Court victory in Obergefell v. Hodges, which made the freedom to marry the law of the land. The ACLU represented our dear friends Ivan Williams and Chuck Killion in the Wyoming Supreme Court in a case that made marriage equality the law of the Equality State.

Recently, the ACLU led the fight to protect the rights of asylum seekers when the government imposed an illegal order denying their rights under US and international law to seek refuge when threatened with violence in their own country.  The ACLU won a Supreme Court case challenging the Trump administration's policy of barring survivors of domestic violence & gang violence from seeking asylum.

Blessed are those who hunger for justice. The word justice appears more than 1500 times in the Bible. Jesus used the parable of the unjust judge to teach us that finding justice doesn’t require changing hearts and minds. It requires persistence among those who seek it and the courage of all of us to bless and uphold those who thirst for it.

I want to close with a reference to an exciting new translation of the New Testament by Dr. David Bentley Hart and published last month by Yale University Press. I’ll be talking more about it later but this morning I want to employ some of the words he uses in his introduction, words to describe the first century followers of Jesus that remind me of those we bless this morning.

He says that genuine understanding of these men and women exposes the “utter strangeness of their vision.” Dr. Hart says that when one truly ventures into their world, “one enters into the company of radicals” who are guided by faith in a world-altering revelation, and hence, values almost absolutely inverse to the social, political, and economic views of human culture.

This morning we are blessed to enter into the company of such radicals. In our world, that company of radicals are our passionate partners JUNTOS and the American Civil Liberties Union and on the occasion of the celebration of Martin Luther King’s birth, it is right that we bless their work of carrying on his legacy. AMEN