OCTOBER 24, 2021 – Yesterday evening my wife and I and four friends (our theater group of yore) attended a play for the first time in nearly two years. To gain admittance to the Guthrie Theater, you had to show your ticket, a photo i.d., and proof of Covid vaccination. All good.
The name of the play: What the Constitution Means to Me, by Heidi Schreck. It was about Ms. Schreck’s teenage experience earning college money as a contestant in the American Legion national speech competition on the U.S. Constitution.
I was skeptical going into the theater, but I came out feeling encouraged.
Initially, I was afraid the play would extol the sacrosanct “highest law of the land”—either from the perspective of strict constructionism or liberal constructionism, though I doubted it would be the former. Over the past four years, I’ve concentrated more on the flaws of the Constitution than on its strengths. Consequently, I’m more interested in how the Constitution can be changed—even substituted—not preserved.
The play centered on the Ninth Amendment (enumerated rights aren’t exclusive) and the Fourteenth Amendment (citizenship; due process; liberty; naturalization; immunity), and focused almost entirely on women’s rights.
After exposing the Constitution’s shortcomings with regard to women’s rights—or as some critiques would fairly say, its disregard for women’s rights—the play informed us of the difference between “negative rights” and “affirmative rights’; that our Constitution grants primarily negative rights, while 179 countries have legal frameworks securing “affirmative rights,” which, the play asserts, are better than negative ones. (The implicit claim that 179 countries are superior to the U.S. in this regard is patently questionable, given that there are 195 recognized countries in the world, and from a practical standpoint, many of the 179 grant and secure fewer rights than we do under our flawed Constitution.)
My own thesis—shared, I hope, by a growing number of citizens—is that the Constitution is even more fundamentally flawed than coming up short on women’s rights. The document’s origins can be traced to disunity among the Founders and the 13 different “countries” they represented. Accentuating that disunity was the fact that Constitutional rights didn’t even apply to enslaved Blacks, indigenous people or, of course, women. The “highest law of the land” originated out of disunity and perpetuated disunity to the point of the Civil War—and subsequently led to our current polarization.
The play concluded with a staged debate over the ultimate question: should the Constitution be scrapped altogether?
Whoa!
I fully grasp the reaction, “It’ll never happen.” What gives me encouragement, however, is that against the perpetual backdrop of “states rights,” Congressional dysfunctionality, financial influence of special interests, disproportionate power of small-state senators, undemocratic potentiality of the electoral college, and inadequacy of “throwing the bastards out,” we are finally talking about altering the basic anachronistic structure of governance.
Revolution and its often horrific disruptions occur when timely, meaningful reform doesn’t. Such reform doesn’t happen unless its necessity is at front and center stage. It certainly was yesterday evening at the Guthrie, and that’s a start.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
