What’s in a Name: the Fallacy of the “Supreme Court”
by Dennis Peacocke
Names or titles tend to define one’s identity once they are understood and idealized. They become a kind of guidepost and thereby shape and define what one is “supposed to be like.” That is precisely the current problem with the contemporary United States Supreme Court. Cut loose from the spiritual moorings of its eighteenth-century founders, who clearly saw God’s heavenly courts as supreme and man’s courts as temporal, the current U.S. Supreme Court has become frighteningly delusional. In our increasingly secular context we would be far better off to rename that court, “The Constitutional Court of the United States of America.” Perhaps the force of striving to live up to one’s name might kick in and the majority of the court might regain its senses.
Indeed, the Supreme Court’s true and founding purpose was to mandate that all United States law conform to the Constitution’s intentions and codes. Today, several of its members believe their personal opinions of what is culturally proper for contemporary life are what make the body “supreme,” and not the conforming of their legal decisions to the Constitution itself.
As President Bush faces the daunting task of selecting Supreme Court nominees and getting them passed through Congress without a “melt-down,” multitudes are aware of what is at stake for the future of our nation. All sides of the political spectrum will demand to be heard in the coming debates. I predict that it will highlight two significant things about the current state of the American culture. Firstly, it will show how deeply divided we are as a people and the increasing level of incendiary rhetoric that is growing between the left/right edges of the political spectrum. Secondly, it will underscore to numbers of us just how obscured the real issues of this judicial battle truly are.
As many of us know, this battle is a spiritual conflict dressed in political clothing. While it appears to be a battle between the left/right, liberal/conservative axes, it is truly between two kingdoms, that is, the Kingdom of God and the secular kingdoms of this world. One side is generally clear on the spiritual forces behind the conflict. The other side denies such a reality and cries “foul” to even suggest such a “simple-minded” view that makes the conflict rest upon eternal values and forces rather than secular and purely political ones. However, to take this level of reality into the marketplace of ideas, rather than keeping it in the realm of prayer and spiritual warfare, is foolish, and unnecessarily inflames our opponents while marginalizing our own arguments.
Instead what is needed to preserve this clear line of strategic reality is this: This is not about left/right or pro-life/pro-choice politics, this is about how our nation and its leaders view the Constitution and its mandate and how these legal flexibilities it has apply to contemporary life. To frame the arguments any other way is to play symptoms against symptoms, and to miss the root causes altogether. This is, politically speaking, not about the left/right game. It is about our nation’s view of the law and whether or not it is anchored to our founding documents. That we have avoided this truly pivotal question so long and hence slipped into the inevitable legal and spiritual morass resulting from this oversight is a testimony to our own blindness. Until this question becomes the commonly discussed question, we are naively playing a loser’s game.
Let’s stop the charade of having people lay their hand on the Bible in the courts of the land. Let’s stop the charade of presidents and judges using the Bible as their statements of honesty and commitment. Let’s stop the charade of having every inductee into the United States military “swearing to protect the Constitution.” Once and for all, let’s get real, and that is...
the bottom line.
