Sometime before June, if things go true to form, President Obama is going to issue a warning to the Supreme Court to look after its reputation and refrain from outlawing the birth-control mandate of ObamaCare. He tried that stunt the last time ObamaCare was before the Nine, and Chief Justice Roberts switched his vote.
Was the chief justice afraid? That is the word I keep thinking of. It is the word at the heart of perhaps the most famous utterance on religious freedom in American history — George Washington’s letter to the Jews.
Our first president sent it in 1790, replying to the warm greeting addressed to him by the members of the Touro Synagogue when Washington had visited Rhode Island.
No one mentioned Washington’s letter during Tuesday’s oral arguments before the high court. Yet the case against the birth-control mandate of ObamaCare is being brought by two families of religious Christians — the Greens and the Hahns — who are just the sort of pious persons Washington welcomed to the new republic.
Washington wrote of the “days of difficulty and danger” of the Revolution. He wrote about how, if we could find wisdom, we “cannot fail, under the just administration of a good government, to become a great and happy people.”
Americans had “given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy,” Washington wrote.
“All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship,” the president wrote. No longer, he added, was toleration “spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.”
The reason was that “happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”
Washington made a point of avowing that he was pleased that the members of the Touro Synagogue had a favorable opinion of his administration and had expressed “fervent wishes for my felicity.” It was formal, even a bit awkward, but in any event a touching note of appreciation.
And then came the famous words: “May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants — while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”
I have often thought about that sentence — which echoes Micah 4:4 in the Hebrew Bible — for years. It’s not an unconditional welcome: Washington prays that the Jews “merit” as well as “enjoy” good will. But neither is it limited to the Jews: The prayer to be able to sit in safety is sought for “every one” so that “there shall be none to make him afraid.”
There is that word — “afraid.”
It is hard to imagine right now that the families before the Supreme Court are not afraid. David Green, owner of Hobby Lobby, has spent a lifetime building a company that may be forced to choose between its religion and millions of dollars in fines, or even dissolution.
The same must be true of Norman Hahn, whose family owns Conestoga Wood Specialties. They are Mennonites, whose ancestors were driven all over, and even out of, Europe rather than give up on their religious principles. All they’ve built up here could now be in jeopardy.
How can Washington’s prayer not encompass such families? They are not asking anyone to be denied birth control or abortion-type drugs. But they fear God’s judgment if they take part, and they clearly fear being forced to take part. No one in this case has ever questioned their sincerity.
Is there going to be no place in the American system for them — and, incidentally, for the Orthodox Jews who have filed amici briefs on their side of the case? No doubt the Nine will have their work cut out for them. What a tangle of legal cases they’re going to have to sort through.
President Washington ended his letter to the Jews with a prayer that seems as apt now as it was then: “May the father of all mercies scatter light, and not darkness, upon our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in His own due time and way everlastingly happy.”