The Truth, The Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Truth
The Truth, The Whole Truth and Nothing But The Truth!
This election will soon come to an end together with a new administration and the end of 4 difficult years for our country. What may not come to an end is the existential threat to democracy that we have seen over the last four years with an attack on “the truth”.
Disagreements are not only tolerated in a democracy they are encouraged. Respectful well-reasoned arguments only make us better as a people and a country, but what happens when we lose the commonality of what is truth?
In my opinion truth has been the number one casualty of these last four years. When we had a key administration adviser, Kellyanne Conway saying we have “alternative facts”, and people accepted this as reality I knew we were in trouble. I have some facility with 4 languages but not newspeak. Not since George Orwell’s 1984 has there been such an attack on veracity. When the President and all his men told us that he had the largest attendance ever at his inauguration, despite photographs to the contrary, I knew we were in for troubled waters and this from a man who told his wife, “he’s the President and I want to give him a month, maybe he will grow into the position.” A comment by the way that she has reminded me about for the last 4 years, and not in a good way.
How can we engage in reasoned arguments when we do not pay attention to and respect facts? I am familiar with alternative facts from way before the Trump era, but we used to call them, lies.
A teenager comes home at 12 am wobbling into the house and smelling of cheap alcohol. His parents reprimand him for his lateness and then say he smells like a bar. He responds by saying that he was not drinking. “How can you say that?” they ask him in anger and astonishment and without missing a beat he responds, “simple mom, alternative facts”.
If that was not bad enough, millions of Americans live in their news bubbles. Some only watch Fox, others only MSNBC, and those are the relative reasonable options. There are right wing news outlets that make Fox sound timid. There are curated news feeds on the Orwellian Box called a cell phone that sends me articles I will want to read because of a google search that I made or a product inquiry I researched. No one trusts anyone from the other team and we only listen to our team.
With this as background I want to address a recent Supreme Court decision. The case is important, and I will return to it in a moment, but the reporting centered on the contribution to the court that Judge Amy Coney Barret was already making.
As I initially read the story it seemed to be a case of religious freedom and protecting the first amendment. Two lawsuits were brought to the Supreme Court against a ruling by the State of New York to limit attendance in houses of worship to 10 people in a red zone which signified a major outbreak of Covid in that area. In what would require a keen sense of history and irony the two suits were combined when heard by the Court. One was filed by the Agudath Israel, an umbrella organization of Haredi Jews that I probably disagree with as often as I disagree with President Trump, and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn. Bridget Loves Bernie, or if you are older, Abie’s Irish Rose, had a greater chance of getting together than these two groups.
Initially I thought this was a real good case about two important and competing values. On the one hand was protecting Constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion. Clearly this is an especially important American protection. On the other hand, the state has an interest in the welfare of its people, and in not overwhelming the medical capacity to deal with the ever-increasing number of very sick individuals. What need, trumps the other?
To me it was simple and obvious. We could always miss a service and go to another in a few weeks or months, but there is no other option if you are dead.
As the ruling came down in favor of the plaintiffs by a 5 to 4 vote the bubble went into effect. In my bubble it was all about how these Conservative judges ruled for religion over saving lives and how Justice Barret was now tipping her hand on where we can expect the court to go. My first response was to accept that rendition and say, “woe is me all is lost”. Don’t these Justices realize that if 100 people go to church and 6 catch the virus those 6 will go to 6 other services of 100, and they will each infect 6 and so now we have 6 plus 36 who will go on to infect the next batch , what we call a geometric increase?
Something about this case did not sit right with me. Could the justices really prize the first amendment over the lives of innocent third parties who never went to church but shared a cup of coffee with a religious friend who was asymptomatic? I read some more material outside my bubble and I was shocked to see what the case was about.
It was never an argument about the first amendment and freedom of religion, it was about equal treatment between those who practiced religion and those who gathered in similar indoor ways for purely secular purposes. While churches and synagogues were restricted to as few as 10 people in a church that may have held 500 or 1000 people, restaurants and bars were restricted to a percentage of occupancy which was way more than 10 people. Essential businesses were allowed to be open and unrestricted. As Justice Gorsuch wrote in a concurring opinion, “ It is time-past time -to make plain that, while the pandemic poses many grave challenges, there is no world in which the Constitution tolerates color-coded executive edicts that reopen liquor stores and bike shops but shutter churches, synagogues and mosques.”
In my bubble the story was about a Conservative court coming to save religion at any cost. Unstated but always imagined, abortion is next. In reality,it was a reasonable decision to protect religion from uneven and discriminatory treatment. Not a bad thing.
This is a cautionary tale. To protect truth, we must start doing some more work. We need to be skeptical of what we are fed by our news sources and use some critical reasoning. If it does not make sense check it out. Truth truly hangs in the balance.
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