Christian Nation (26 page)
After the
Gonzales
decision, President Jordan released a short statement expressing his gratification that the dreams and prayers of millions of Americans had been answered. He called the short forty-four-year period during which abortion services had been widely available “our national nightmare.” He noted correctly that since 2009 more Americans had self-identified as pro-life than pro-choice and that finally the federal judiciary had stood aside and acquiesced to the will of the people. “This is a landmark day in America’s history,” he said. “We have in one day taken a first step in creating a more perfect democracy and at the same time removed one of the greatest sources of God’s displeasure with America.”
Later that night, in one of the first signs that the governor of New York, former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg, would emerge as a national leader in opposition to the Jordan administration, the governor announced that the Supreme Court’s decision was wrong and “unacceptable,” although he refused then to be baited into stating what that meant. Instead, he reported that New York National Guard troops had been dispatched to provide physical security at every family planning and abortion clinic in the state and he had signed an executive order that day making women from any other state eligible to receive such services in the state of New York. He said that abortion doctors and family planning professionals fleeing other states would be welcomed in New York. He also announced that his charitable foundation had set aside $300 million to provide funding to any woman in the country who could not afford to travel to New York for family planning, counseling, or abortion services.
In a carefully planned move, the relatively subdued statement from the president contrasted with a frenzy of excitement from F3. We had the first of many demonstrations of the consequences of having a president who personally controlled the nation’s largest and most influential media conglomerate. This was quite different from the nationalization of media we had seen in other countries or even the alignment between newspapers and political parties that had long been the practice in the United Kingdom. Although F3 was often aligned with the Republican Party, it was not under its control. It did, however, act at the direction of the president, who together with Ralph Reed controlled the Faith & Freedom Coalition and who, after the merger with Fox, maintained, together with the Murdochs, a controlling position in the company. As a result, the White House communications director, for the first time in history, was not only orchestrating use of the media platform provided by the presidency but also determining the coverage provided to that president by America’s largest and most influential family of media outlets. This allowed President Jordan to be “presidential” and for F3 to play the role of agent provocateur, urging the people into the streets to show their “intolerance” for baby killers and calling for law enforcement—or, should they fail to act, the Christian militias—to stand on guard to prevent the murder of unborn children.
The results were predictable. In every state that did not join New York in dispatching National Guard troops to provide security for clinics, the clinics were subjected to vociferous around-the-clock demonstrations and overt threats of violence by armed Christian militias. Many were burned. Within a week, without state legislatures even having to act, providers of abortion and other family planning services had abandoned great swaths of the middle of the country.
I
T WAS
THE
Gonzales
decision that thrust me, personally, into a public role. Sanjay and Walt argued that it was strategically desirable for TW to have a second spokesman. Sanjay, they argued, should continue to speak on political and moral issues. He would continue to be the face, voice, and emotional center of the opposition. But legal matters were different. What was needed there was credibility and authority. I would be promoted as an establishment figure, a lawyer with unimpeachable credentials as a former partner of one of the country’s most prestigious law firms. I would serve as an expert, outside of politics, interpreting for the people the technical implications of the New Freedom legislative program and the actions of the Supreme Court. “Just be yourself,” advised Walt. “Don’t try to be Sanjay.”
Surprisingly, it was easy. When I stood in front of the cameras, I just pretended that I was briefing a client. One thing a corporate lawyer learns to do well is to take complex legal issues and translate them for a corporate executive—the decision maker—in a way that he or she can understand. My first press conference, with Sanjay and Walt standing at my side, was on the subject of
Gonzales
. My message was simple. Although the independent press had correctly interpreted the case as allowing the state legislatures to criminalize abortion at any time, including from the point of conception, they had failed to focus on the implications of the manner in which
Roe
was overturned. The Supreme Court’s decision in
Roe
was built on decades of Supreme Court jurisprudence that established a constitutional “right to privacy.” This “right” is not listed in the Bill of Rights. The word “privacy” does not appear in the Constitution. Instead, the court developed the concept of a “right to privacy” to capture the overarching constitutional presumption in favor of personal liberty that needed to be taken into account when judging whether laws infringing those liberties were constitutional. The right to choose to have an abortion before the fetus is viable was not the only “right” implied in the Constitution based on the right to privacy. The others included the right to engage in whatever private sexual acts you choose in the privacy of your bedroom, the right to read or view pornography in the privacy of your residence, the right to choose to terminate medical treatment, the right to marry the person you choose, the right to procreate or withhold from procreation, and the right to rear your children as you see fit, including to select the schools they attend. None of these rights is enumerated in the Constitution. But the
Supreme Court had held for many years prior to
Roe v. Wade
that this right to privacy is there: there because the Ninth Amendment makes clear that the list of rights in the Bill of Rights is
not
exclusive; there because the Bill of Rights itself should be read expansively; and there because the substantive due process rights established by the Fourteenth Amendment extend to protect our personal “liberty.” Take away this “right to privacy,” I pointed out, and the constitutional door was once again open for federal and state governments to legislate in the sphere of sex, family, and personal behavior. Our liberties were in grave danger. No serious scholar disagreed with me, but none of us had a constitutional answer. The president was duly elected, Moore had been duly appointed and confirmed by the Senate, and the Supreme Court had spoken. This was now the law of the land.
The great irony here was that for decades the far right had argued that when constitutional processes failed us and our personal liberties were at stake, the founders had wisely ensured an armed population to prevent tyranny from again taking root in the New World. But now, without irony, and showing the hypocrisy demonstrated in the Terri Schiavo affair, F3 assured the nation that the only true freedom, the only freedom consistent with the views of our Founding Fathers and our national destiny, was the New Freedom. The law of the land, they said, was clear, and we had no higher duty as citizens than to submit to the rule of law even when we disagreed with the result.
I do not recollect this in an immodest way, but from that moment on, TW—and not the Democratic Party, the ACLU, or any other political organization—became the primary voice of opposition. And we got their attention. F3 and the president were not amused when I published a paper demonstrating that the right to homeschooling and the right to send your child to a religious, and not public, school were both based on the right to privacy, and that the Supreme Court’s decision opened the way for states to legislate away these parental prerogatives. We had a lively debate at TW about whether we should urge the remaining blue states to do just that.
For the superstitiously minded, it was tempting at the time to accept that Jordan had benefitted from some sort of divine intervention or, at the least, extraordinary good luck. Had Justice Ginsberg not died at exactly the moment she did, and had
Gonzales
not become ripe for cert just after Justice Moore’s arrival, the Farris Commission would have had neither the courage nor the legal basis to formulate The Blessing in the way that it did, and American history would have been very different.
Adam disapproves of this line of thought. He tells me to stick to the story and not waste energy with “what ifs.” I disagree. Didn’t he tell me my job was “
What happened? Why did it happen? How could it have happened
?” Don’t the “what-ifs” help us to answer the why? Don’t they illuminate the truth about history, the truth that is so deeply unsatisfying to the human mind—that human choices interact uncertainly with random events to determine the course of the story? What if John McCain had not risked America’s future for political advantage and had rejected Sarah Palin as his running mate? He had a choice. What if the cellular membrane holding in the tiny bulge in President McCain’s cerebral artery had not failed that day in Moscow? A random event. What if I, and only a few hundred more like me, had joined Sanjay six years earlier? A choice. What if Justice Ginsberg had survived for another twelve months? A random event. So how could it have happened? Well, it seems to me that you needed to have both. Without the bad choices, the random events would not have mattered. Without the random events, the bad choices would not have led to disaster.
The report of the Farris Commission was released by the president in a national address on July 4, and for the first time Americans learned about the fifty Blessings that would come to control every aspect of their lives. The fifty Blessings were unlike any other legislative program in the history of the republic. The president explained:
My fellow Americans, for over five months a group of our most experienced and distinguished legislators, this country’s finest legal scholars, our leading historians, experts on the Constitution, our best theologians and the most trusted Christian leaders in the land have worked together day and night to understand to what great purpose this nation is called and how to restore this nation to grace and greatness. Not since the Continental Congress assembled in Philadelphia to boldly dedicate their lives to establishing a nation under God have wiser or better men pondered the future course of our republic.
And yes, he was being accurate. Not a single woman served on the Farris Commission.
They prayed together and they prayed separately; they prayed day and night for the Lord to guide them and were overwhelmed and humbled at the wisdom with which God filled them. I am told that when the Commission members assembled in the morning, one would tell the group that he had prayed all night on the question before them and been given the answer by our Lord—and the others around the table would fall to their knees in wonder and thanks, as each had received exactly the same answer to his own prayers. The Lord was truly with them.
The president bowed his head, as if momentarily overcome, and then looked up and continued.
So what was revealed to these men by the Lord? I assembled the Commission led by Michael Farris to formulate a legislative program to implement the New Freedom program announced at my inauguration. Proving once again that God does always know best, they have come back to me with something different: not a series of regular laws but a covenant. My fellow Americans, by the grace of God, what I have the honor to give to you today is a final covenant with our Lord, a covenant to put this nation on the path of virtue, grace, and obedience, and to secure for all Americans the gift of eternal salvation through Jesus.
Most Americans know their Bible well, but I remind you that the first covenant was made by Abraham, and then later God sent His son, Jesus, and made a new covenant with mankind—a covenant that if we believe in Him and accept Jesus as our savior, then in the eyes of God the death of Jesus will atone for our sins.
And now, a new and final covenant—the last before the second coming of Jesus—is offered to us by God to restore America to its true purpose and former greatness. This new covenant is a magnificent blessing, the greatest blessing bestowed by God on any nation or people. It seals for us God’s favor and protection; if we accept it, it will once again make this land God’s shining city on a hill, a holy and sacred place that He will henceforth protect from all evil. This is why our new American covenant with the Lord is called The Blessing.
The Blessing is an offer from God. I submit it today, on the nation’s birthday—which will also henceforth be the date of our nation’s rebirth in Christ—to the Congress and to the American people. God offers us this new covenant, and you, through your chosen representatives, must decide whether to accept it. Later today the full text of The Blessing will be e-mailed to every American with an e-mail address. I ask you to read it, to study it, to pray about it. I ask every congregation in America to devote this Sunday to prayer and discussion. Then, please communicate with your representatives and senators. In two weeks’ time, Congress will take a simple yes or no vote. If they accept The Blessing on behalf of the American people, I will sign it immediately, and it will become a binding covenant between this nation and God, with the status of a law that prevails over all other laws of the land. Over time, our laws and regulations and procedures will be conformed to it. I trust this momentous decision to our great democracy and to our God-given Constitution. I know these great institutions will not fail us. God bless you, and God bless America.