It's about who we are

It’s easy to compress past events in history – like the years between the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1791 – and to carry in those intervening years as one event in our mind’s eye and in our heart – in this case, that place where we stow our cultural memories with all of their feelings, fears, hopes and assurances about who we are in the world and where we are in time and space.
A great deal happened in those 15 years – the Revolutionary War, a period of unstable government, the writing of the Constitution that tried to bring together people divided by a variety of factions and then drafting a Bill of Rights, a document that seems so fundamental to our culture and which is so deeply ingrained into our political hearts. Men we now consider to be heroes vigorously opposed even having a bill of rights arguing (among other things) that if we write some down, we might lose others.
When we celebrate the Fourth of July, we celebrate all of those events: our nation’s founding, its victories, its survival and the creation of the freedoms and rights we treasure. Living out that heritage is so much a part of our daily lives that it often goes unnoticed. In an era of religious enthusiasm, that first amendment right to religious affiliation and expression on the one hand and the prohibition of the government’s establishment of a particular religion on the other, have daily significance.
In mid June, just a few weeks ago, those past events, the writing of the Constitution in particular, became especially significant when the Supreme Court, citing Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution, held that one of the key elements of the U.S. Administration’s anti-terrorist package was unconstitutional. Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said, “The laws and Constitution are designed to survive and remain in force, in extraordinary times.”
Less than two weeks later, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ordered that one of the Guantanamo prisoners be released or given a new hearing by a military tribunal. These actions of the court are powerful evidence that the system created in those 15 years of combat, argument and compromise still works.
One of the reasons the system has worked so long and so well is that the people who designed that system had actually been working at it for a long time – a long time before 1776 and they were particularly hard at it during the 15 years between 1776 and the final products, the Constitution in 1788 and the Bill of Rights in 1791. More important than their persistence, their talent and the vigor of their arguments however, was their agreement on specific fundamentals about the nature of the human persons and their relationships with one another. They shared a common vision of reality, a common sense of destiny and a common hope!
The nation’s founders were no strangers to issues of detention and torture; the French and Indian War was a part of the personal memories of the men who met at Philadelphia. Their common historical memory as Englishmen furnished them with a horror of assassinations and conspiracies such as the Gunpowder Plot and its attempt to undo the government of England. In spite of these experiences, and in spite of this historical background, the founders of our nation sought to specifically limit the government’s power to detain without due process, and also to prohibit cruel and unusual punishment in both the body of the Constitution and in the Bill of Rights.
Ironically, their efforts to deprive government of its capacity to rely on those ancient violent instruments so characteristic of tyrannies did not prevent the people of the United States or its government from institutionalizing those practices in places like Guantanamo and the prison at Abu Grahib.
When we celebrate the Fourth and all of those events that go along with the establishment of a free nation, we have a great heritage to celebrate, a heritage that we have recently found to memorialize on holidays, than to observe in living out our daily lives. It’s not about history; it’s about who we are.

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