More is at risk than abortion and gay marriage California must protect itself from the rise of "A Handmaid's Tale" theonomist judiciary

Theonomists use Biblical moral pronouncements as the standard by which the laws of governments may be measured.

Nobody Expects The Spanish Inquisition is a popular meme which, if you click the link, is supported by videos viewed by millions, graphic images, and even T-shirts. It has not been used in reference to the Supreme Court. Yet.

Contrary to everything I understand about religion vis-à-vis the Judicial Branch within the Union is reflected in this from Wikipedia:

   Of the 113 justices who have been appointed to the court, 91 have been from various Protestant denominations, 12 have been Catholics (one other justice, Sherman Minton, converted to Catholicism after leaving the Court). Another, Neil Gorsuch, was raised in the Catholic Church but later attended an Episcopal church, though without specifying the denomination to which he felt he belonged.
    At the beginning of 2010, Justice John Paul Stevens was the sole remaining Protestant on the Court In April 2010, Justice Stevens announced his retirement, effective as of the Court's 2010 summer recess. Upon Justice Stevens' retirement, which formally began on June 28, 2010, the Court lacked a Protestant member, marking the first time in its history that it was exclusively composed of Jewish and Catholic justices. Although in January 2017, after seven years with no Protestant justices serving or nominated, President Donald Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch to the Court, as noted above it is unclear whether Gorsuch considers himself a Catholic or an Episcopalian.
    This development led to some comment. Law school professor Jeffrey Rosen wrote that "it's a fascinating truth that we've allowed religion to drop out of consideration on the Supreme Court, and right now, we have a Supreme Court that religiously at least, by no means looks like America".

That "we have a Supreme Court that religiously at least, by no means looks like America" is a bit of an understatement. Consider this chart:

While generally courts are expected to administer the law as written, or at least as the judge reads it, the Supreme Court applies standards to laws to decide if they violate statements such as "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States."

Some of us think that which religion one was raised in can influence what one believes is right and wrong. Some of us think that one's values are influenced by grade school and high school experiences. Some of us think that adults make judgements based upon their associations with their college professors and fellow university students, as much as they do based on which books they read.

So, yes, it is troubling not only for law school professor Jeffrey Rosen but of many Americans that five of the eight current Supreme Court Justices were raised Roman Catholic while the other three were raised in Judaism. It is also troubling that four of the eight (half) attended parochial schools. It is also troubling that not one attended a state institution of higher learning at any time in their college education.

Even if one ignores the fact that only three of the Justices are women, or only one is Hispanic and only one is black while seven are white, one could comfortably state that we have a Supreme Court that by no means looks like America in terms of formation of values and intellect.

Note that the caption under the picture at the top of this post states "Theonomists use Biblical moral pronouncements as the standard by which the laws of governments may be measured." It's surprisingly easy for many older persons to dismiss this theonomist concern about the Court when discussed only in the context of abortion or gay marriage. But it isn't quite as easy to dismiss it when considering Justice Neil Gorsuch's reasoned doctoral thesis that asserts that assisted suicide for the terminally ill is homicide - no mitigations are allowed:

What if within the next decade the Constitutionality of state laws allowing assisted suicide for terminally ill patients is resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court? Here are excerpts from The Right to Receive Assistance in Suicide and Euthanasia, with Particular Reference to the Law of the United States written in 2004 by Trump-appointed U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, when he was a candidate for a DPhil degree in law (legal philosophy), University College, Oxford, supervised by the natural law philosopher John Finnis :
    I consider legal doctrine surrounding autonomy and personal privacy, and conclude that it is likely too weak a foundation on which to build a judicially created right to assisted suicide (Chapter V).
    I submit that there is a secular moral theory which, to date, has been largely neglected in contemporary American debate over assisted suicide and euthanasia. This theory rests on the notion that the intentional taking of human life by private persons is always wrong.
    After considering arguments from history, fairness, autonomy doctrine and theory, and utilitarianism, I suggested that courts and legislators may wish to consider a less frequently voiced perspective on the assisted suicide and euthanasia question, one grounded in the recognition of human life as a fundamental good. Under this view, private intentional acts of homicide are always wrong. Recognizing human life as intrinsically, not instrumentally, valuable, I submitted, would rule out assisted suicide and euthanasia.

Take a hard look at that list of Justices above.

One of the three names most mentioned by the "Trump people" to replace Kennedy is Amy Coney Barrett. Raised a Catholic, she graduated from St. Mary's Dominican High School in New Orleans. She received her BA from Rhodes College (formerly known as Southwestern Presbyterian University after being founded as the Masonic University of Tennessee), a private college located in Memphis, Tennessee. She then went to the Catholic Notre Dame Law School, where she taught full time as a Professor of Law from 2002 until 2017. She continues to teach part-time since since November 2, 2017, when she received Senate confirmation after President Donald Trump nominated Barrett to serve as a United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

She has seven children: five biological children and two children adopted from Haiti.

She is an active member of a particularly conservative Catholic religious group called People of Praise described as follows in Wikipedia:

    People of Praise was formed in 1971 by Kevin Ranaghan and Paul DeCelles. Both men were involved in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, in which Pentecostal religious experiences such as baptism in the Holy Spirit, speaking in tongues and prophecy were practiced by Catholics. In its early history, it influenced the institutional development of the Catholic Charismatic movement in the United States and played important roles in national charismatic conferences.

    People of Praise practices a controversial form of spiritual direction that involves supervision of a member by a more spiritually mature person called a "head". People of Praise maintains that members retain their freedom of conscience under such direction. The community excludes women from the highest leadership positions and teaches that men are the spiritual leaders of their families. At the same time, it encourages women to pursue higher education and employment. Former People of Praise member and Catholic critic Adrian Reimers has accused People of Praise of being too ecumenical and of compromising Catholic teaching by embracing Protestant ecclesiology.
    It is not a church or denomination, and membership is open to any baptized Christian who affirms the Nicene Creed and agrees to the community's covenant. The majority of its members are Catholics, but Protestants can also join. It has 21 branches in the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean, with approximately 3,000 members including children. It founded a group of non-denominational Christian schools, Trinity Schools.

During Barrett's Circuit Judge confirmation hearing, U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein questioned Barrett about whether her Catholic faith would influence her decision-making on the court. Feinstein, concerned about whether Barrett would uphold Roe v. Wade given her Catholic beliefs, stated "the dogma lives loudly within you, and that is a concern". The line of questioning became a point of outrage from many of her defenders, both Catholic and non-Catholic alike.

The subject of Feinstein and other Democrats' concern was a 1998 article by Barrett where she argued that Catholic judges should in some cases recuse themselves from death penalty cases because of their moral objections to the death penalty. Feinstein's line of questioning was criticized by some observers and legal experts while defended by others.

During her hearing, Barrett said: "It is never appropriate for a judge to impose that judge's personal convictions, whether they arise from faith or anywhere else, on the law." That might seem comforting to some, but as reported her academic writing is far less comforting to those who support Roe and Obergefell:

     "There is little reason to think that reversals [of past decisions] would do much damage" to the court's reputation, she wrote. "I tend to agree with those who say that a justice's duty is to the Constitution" rather than to a precedent she thinks is clearly in conflict with it.

People learn not only from the upbringing and education, but as young adults from who they work for. Barrett worked a year as clerk to late Justice Antonin Scalia. Over the years Scalia repeatedly called upon his colleagues to strike down Roe v. Wade. In Obergefell v. Hodges in which the 5-4 majority decision written by Justice Kennedy struck down laws prohibiting gay marriage, in his dissenting opinion Scalia noted there were no evangelical Christians on the Court (he also literally dismissed California which we'll explore later):

    Take, for example, this Court, which consists of only nine men and women, all of them successful lawyers who studied at Harvard or Yale Law School. Four of the nine are natives of New York City. Eight of them grew up in east- and west-coast States. Only one hails from the vast expanse in-between. Not a single South-westerner or even, to tell the truth, a genuine Westerner (California does not count). Not a single evangelical Christian (a group that comprises about one quarter of Americans), or even a Protestant of any denomination.

Unlike her male counterparts, Barrett admits she is occasionally conflicted about her role as a judge relative to her religion. In a 1998 article Barrett argued that Catholic judges should in some cases recuse themselves from death penalty cases because of their moral objections to the death penalty. Presumably she does not want the murderer to die. And presumably she would be conflicted about physician assisted suicide, but whether she would recuse herself if that subject reached a court she was on is doubtful.

It is worth noting the other blunt, though perhaps heartfult, dissents in the Obergefell case.

Chief Justice Roberts noted: "Today’s decision...creates serious questions about religious liberty. Many good and decent people oppose same-sex marriage as a tenet of faith, and their freedom to exercise religion is—unlike the right imagined by the majority—actually spelled out in the Constitution." He goes further stating: "The majority graciously suggests that religious believers may continue to “advocate” and “teach” their views of marriage. ...The First Amendment guarantees, however, the freedom to “exercise” religion. Ominously, that is not a word the majority uses." He does not elaborate on what he means by "exercise" religion in the context of its impact on others.

Justice Samuel Alito expressed concern that the majority's opinion would be used to attack the beliefs of those who disagree with same-sex marriage, who "will risk being labeled as bigots and treated as such by governments, employers, and schools", leading to "bitter and lasting wounds" and defending the rationale of the states, accepting the premise that same-sex marriage bans serve to promote procreation and the optimal child rearing environment.

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote: "Aside from undermining the political processes that protect our liberty, the majority’s decision threatens the religious liberty our Nation has long sought to protect." He extensively explored the history of religion in from the time of the colonies noting that "in our society, marriage is not simply a governmental institution; it is a religious institution as well" concluding that "today’s decision might change the former, but it cannot change the latter. It appears all but inevitable that the two will come into conflict, particularly as individuals and churches are confronted with demands to participate in and endorse civil marriages between same-sex couples.'

Thomas is unrestrained as he offers his key opinion about the primacy of his Catholic upbringing over other individual right issues such as the Constitutionality of state laws banning gay marriage:

    The majority appears unmoved by that inevitability. It makes only a weak gesture toward religious liberty in a single paragraph.... And even that gesture indicates a misunderstanding of religious liberty in our Nation’s tradition. Religious liberty is about more than just the protection for “religious organizations and persons . . . as they seek to teach the principles that are so fulfilling and so central to their lives and faiths.” ... Religious liberty is about freedom of action in matters of religion generally, and the scope of that liberty is directly correlated to the civil restraints placed upon religious practice.

"Religious liberty is about freedom of action in matters of religion generally, and the scope of that liberty is directly correlated to the civil restraints placed upon religious practice." What that literally says is that if a Christian majority in a community voted to start ducking witches (those that practice the Wicca religion), Thomas apparently would struggle with legally condemning the practice as he abhors civil restraints placed on religious practice. And he makes it clear that he thinks America's religious history deserves a place in the law as in his opinion he notes: "Many of the earliest immigrants to America came seeking freedom to practice their religion without restraint. ... When they arrived, they created their own havens for religious practice. ... Many of these havens were initially homogeneous communities with established religions."

Roberts, Alito, and Thomas are three of the four "conservatives" on the Court. Gorsuch, whose words about physician assisted suicide are quoted above, was not on the Court at the time of the Obergefell case.

The Threat of Christian Theonomist Rule

In the map below, the dark grey states are those that adopted certain theonomist laws in the years between 2011-2016, the years leading up to the 2016 elections in which the Republicans won the majority of U.S. House of Representatives, the majority of the U.S. Senate, and the office of  U.S. President, which will lead to a solid Republican majority on the U.S. Supreme Court:

The issue these maps present isn't whether anyone has the right to believe in words in the Bible or rules of personal behavior pronounced by men based on those words. Rather it is what determines the proper role of a state in regulating the personal lives of its people, most particularly when large numbers of people disagree.

In those dark grey states if the adoption of Islamic Sharia law was proposed, those that backed the adoption of certain theonomist laws in the years between 2011-2016 would threaten revolution. In their minds they see no comparison between implementing laws restricting abortion and Sharia law.

As explained by Canadian professor of comparative religion who from 1964–1973 was director of Harvard University's Center for the Study of World Religions Wilfred Cantwell Smith in his Islam in Modern History: "What theology is for the Christian, law is for the Muslim." The problem is within these United States despite the assurances of separation of church and state, controversial biblical pronouncements have a way of becoming law. Thus when I saw the original of the greyed map, I realized that Smith's statement in 21st Century America would be: "What should be Christian theology has become judicially imposed law within these United States."

My understanding is that the belief structure of the majority of the populous in those ten states resulted in the actions of two houses of each state's legislature and the governor of each state putting into law those restrictions.

For me the best understanding that belief structure can be found in the Kansans for Life: Issues web page (Kansans for Life is the largest anti-abortion group in the state) telling their followers (emphasis added) "Our society now recognizes that past discrimination on the basis of race, gender, ethnicity and social status was deeply unjust."

That web page also indicates their immediate political agenda:

    Pro-lifers oppose abortion because it takes the life of a human being before he or she is born....
    We oppose euthanasia and assisted suicide....
    We oppose embryonic stem cell research.... Human embryos are human beings.... And all human beings, regardless of appearance or location (e.g., a petri dish), ought to be treated with respect and not as mere raw material to use for the hypothetical benefit of others.

Notice that their newly discovered unjust discrimination basis does not include "religion" which you might want to argue isn't an indicator of anything. Except you might notice the picture at the top of that issues web page:

And then you might move your cursor over to the "Resources" link at the top of the page and discover this:

Now one might accuse me of making an unfair judgement about people wishing to impose their religious beliefs on others and considering them dangerous to Californians. But I would call the reader's attention to this 2012 article The Koch Brothers and Kansans for Life: The Alliance That Killed the Kansas Moderate or this Topeka rally for life brings thousands to state Capitol.

The first explains how seeking to eliminate government regulations and taxes on business in just one red state the very successful national Koch brothers Neoliberal network (see the post here Worldwide Ascendancy of Neoliberalism) joined with a strong Christian political movement which seeks to expand and tighten state and federal government regulations on the lives of individuals.

The second indicates the deep involvement of Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann and the other Kansas bishops in the Kansans for Life political movement even using students from Catholic grade and high schools. Not that Kansans for Life is a Catholic organization which is clear from this:

Still, many have a problem with the abortion and gay marriage issues being used to demonstrate an insidious encroachment on freedom. Why would I think this is dangerous to Californians?

"California does not count." Justice Antonin Scalia 

I was born in California. I went to elementary school in California. My California high school 1962 graduating class was 393±  students.

It included 28 Japanese-American students (7%) who were born in the Internment Camps where Japanese Americans were relocated - well, American citizens who were as little as 1/16 Japanese heritage and orphaned infants with "one drop of Japanese blood" were placed in internment camps.

It included 41 Hispanic students (10%). Many of their parents and/or grandparents were impacted by the so-called Mexican Repatriation:

    The Mexican Repatriation was a mass deportation of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans from the United States between 1929 and 1936. Estimates of how many were repatriated range from 400,000 to 2,000,000. An estimated sixty percent of those deported were birthright citizens of the United States. Because the forced movement was based on race, and ignored citizenship, the process arguably meets modern legal definitions of ethnic cleansing.

If you add in the two Black classmates (issues: slavery and segregation), the two Chinese classmates (issue: the 1892 - 1940 Chinese Exclusion Act, the only U.S. law ever to prevent immigration and naturalization on the basis of race), and the three Native American classmates (issue: genocide, forced relocation, and removal of children), the governments in the Union (with U.S. Supreme Court approval in some cases) committed heinous acts based on racial bigotry against the parents and/or grandparents of about 20% of my classmates.

Am I paranoid about young black men being murdered by cops, by Hispanic deportation outside the norms of our federal court system, the bluster and potential fallout from "Trade War with China" and the anti-Muslim rhetoric? Or are my concerns valid?

I'm a Californian whose high school graduation in 1962 included a non-mandatory separate invocation event held apart from the graduation ceremony. It was jointly led by a Buddhist Priest, a Jewish Rabbi, a Protestant Minister, and a Catholic Priest. If we were holding such an invocation today it would include others, such as Islamic and an Amah Mutsun Tribal Band representation.

As noted in the chart above and similar to all the current "conservative" Justices, Justice "California-does-not-count" Scalia was raised a Catholic in New York City, attended Xavier High School, a Jesuit (Catholic) military school in Manhattan. He earned his bachelor of arts degree at Georgetown University, also a Jesuit school, and attended  Harvard Law School. Classmate and future New York State official William Stern remembered Scalia in his high school days: "This kid was a conservative when he was 17 years old. An archconservative Catholic. He could have been a member of the Curia. He was the top student in the class. He was brilliant, way above everybody else."

Scalia died in February 2016. But that comment "he could have been a member of the Curia" is troubling on many levels as I believe that it reflects a level of truth about the four "Conservative Justices" listed on the chart above who will remain after the retirement of Justice Kennedy.

Am I paranoid to think there is a real threat of Christian theonomist rule through the Court? Or are my concerns valid?

California now finds itself under a Union government based on minority rule, but it is more like Scalia said: "California does not count."

One of the more misleading 2016 election facts is frequently repeated in the press. And now with the resignation of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy it is being repeated again. For instance, New York Magazine tells us:

    Democrats have won the national vote in six of the last seven presidential elections, which, with the retirement of Anthony Kennedy, will have resulted in the appointment of eight of the Supreme Court’s nine justices. And yet four of those justices will have been appointed by presidents who took office despite having fewer votes than their opponent.
    The House has a massive Republican tilt, requiring Democrats to win the national vote by six or seven points in order to secure a likely majority. The Senate has an even more pronounced tilt, overrepresenting residents of small states, which tend to be white and rural.

Factually the Union (see the post here Why factually these United States is a more perfect Union, not a country, nation, or state) has never been a democracy so it shouldn't surprise anyone that:

• Donald Trump won the Presidency by winning the Electoral College even though Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by a substantial margin;
• Republicans won a substantial majority in the House of Representatives even though Democrats received the majority of the popular vote cast for House candidates; and
• U.S. Senators were not even elected until the 20th Century and the Senate was never intended to reflect the will of the voters nationally.

But there is also another set of facts.

• Without counting California votes, Donald Trump won the popular vote in the 2016 Presidential Election.
• Without counting California votes, the Republicans won the popular vote cast in the 2016 House elections.

It is no small irony that Justice Kennedy, a Californian appointed to the Court by President and Former California Governor Ronald Reagan, while on the Supreme Court usually voted far more conservatively than would be accepted in California.

Only about a third of California voters vote Republican. That reflects California's substantive cultural differences with the red states. We need to consider the following maps:

The map above indicates which political party controls the state legislature, with the blue states controlled by Democrats. This map would seem to belie the quote above when it says: "Democrats have won the national vote in six of the last seven presidential elections." These United States, after all, is not a country, nation, or state, but a Union of diverse states as explained here in Why factually these United States is a more perfect Union, not a country, nation, or state.

But diversity is one thing. This was the map of the Union that immediately preceded Obergefell v. Hodges:

Is there anything about this map that looks similar to the maps above? Considering all of the maps above, would this map surprise anyone:

While I have no problem with these folks trying to alter the behavior of individuals through persuasion (free speech), what they have accomplished within those states is imposing their beliefs about individual behavior on everyone through the law. And what now seems possible is that they could succeed in altering the Wilfred Cantwell Smith phrase "what theology is for the Christian, law is for the Muslim" to "what should be Christian theology has become judicially imposed law within these United States."

Lest you think I'm overstating the situation, consider this. Chief Justice Roberts stated: "Many good and decent people oppose same-sex marriage as a tenet of faith, and their freedom to exercise religion is—unlike the right imagined by the majority—actually spelled out in the Constitution." Justice Thomas wrote: "The First Amendment enshrined protection for the free exercise of religion in the U. S. Constitution."

Those statements are simply a lie. The First Amendment states: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." The key word there is "Congress." At the time of the adoption of the First Amendment, several states had state "established" religions and had laws the favored one religion over another. Other states had laws protecting religious practices ...well, Christian religious practices.

The difficulty in challenging the belief structure of the Court's majority has its foundation in cat videos. Odds are the people today who in the future might find themselves in the same disadvantaged position others did before Roe or Obergefell likely can tell you about YouTube videos in great detail. They just couldn't provide any hint of understanding regarding the fact that Abrahamic religions are one of the major divisions in comparative religion, along with Indian religions, Iranian religions, East Asian religions, African religions, American religions, Oceanic religions,  and classical Hellenistic religions.

The fact is the majority of Americans upon seeing the man pictured to the left would absolutely assume he is a Muslim. In fact, his "freedom to exercise religion" initially was prohibited by the U.S. Postal Service (see news release).

Despite the fact that turban wearing bearded members of the Sikh faith have been a significant element in the British and Indian armies - by the beginning of World War I Sikhs in the British Indian Army totaled 20 percent of the force and by 1945 fourteen Victoria Crosses were awarded to Sikhs, a per-capita regimental record - the good Christian United States military defending our "free exercise" of religion until 2017 would not permit them to serve wearing the turban and beard offering up all sorts of reasons belied by the obvious British/Indian history. And then consider this news story:

    Sikhism was founded in the 16th century by Guru Nanak in Punjab, an area that is now divided between India and Pakistan. Nanak rejected the rituals involved with other South Asian religions and stressed the importance of good deeds such as serving others and treating all people equally.
    The monotheistic religion has more than 25 million followers worldwide and about 500,000 in the United States. Yet a majority of Americans -- 60% -- admitted in a 2015 survey that they knew nothing at all about Sikhs.
    Lawyer and activist Valarie Kaur says the threat of violence seems to have become mainstreamed.
    Her grandfather settled in California a century ago, and she knows firsthand from her family that discrimination against Sikhs existed long before 2001. But 9/11, she says, was a paradigm shift, a turning point.
    She used to talk about living in the "shadow of 9/11." Then the shadow turned out to be long, and what seemed temporary became permanent.

There are between 500,000 and 700,000 Sikhs in the United States, roughly half of them in California. Of course, the beloved Conservative Catholic Justice Scalia made it clear - California does not count.

I must now digress a bit. Being a Northern Californian I did work with a Sikh I considered a friend who was of my generation. Of course, he was a Californian, so his father was Sikh, his mother of Mexican descent, and he was married to a white woman. He was born and raised in the southern-most part of California where he attended a segregated public school (yes, like the rest of the country California has a past bloated with bigotry) and was a beneficiary of Mendez v. Westminster which is part of Scalia's California does not count.

In 1947 a federal circuit court in California ruled that segregation of school children was unconstitutional—except this case involved the segregation of Mexican American school children years before the U.S. Supreme Court ended racial segregation in U.S. schools with Brown v. Board of Education.

The infamous Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reached this historic decision. The Ninth Circuit is generally hated by the right in the United States for its far reaching consistent view that the most important right of all Americans is to be treated equally by other Americans in "the town square."

Historic in its own right, Mendez was critical to the strategic choices and legal analysis used in arguing Brown and in shaping the ideas of a young NAACP attorney, Thurgood Marshall. Moreover, the Mendez case—which originated with the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) but benefited from the participation of the NAACP—also symbolized the important crossover between different ethnic and racial groups who came together to argue in favor of desegregation.

But then again, California does not count, so the Mendez case is not taught in Kansas schools so let's return to the subject at hand.

Sikhism is one of the largest organized religions in the world, with 20 million members living in India and 27 million worldwide. But it is not among the Abrahamic religions that claim descent from the practices of the ancient Israelites and the worship of the God of Abraham, the largest of which are (in alphabetical order) Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. These religions have a long history of violence, so much so that the Wikipedia entry has a section headed Violent conflicts with subsection headings Between Abrahamic religions, Between branches of the same Abrahamic religion, and Between Abrahamic religions and non-adherents. This is religion as embraced in American history and law.
 

I may be paranoid, but...

Some may want to accuse me of paranoia and/or, as they did to Diane Feinstein, accuse me of religious bigotry. But I'm an old Californian whose high school graduation included a non-mandatory separate invocation event where a Buddhist priest led part of the ceremony. I'm an old Californian who had a Sikh friend. I am an old Californian who had friends in high school who because of their racial heritage were born in American concentration camps. I am an old Californian who had friends in high school whose American-born parents and grandparents were subjected to the so-called Mexican Repatriation and whose grand-children are now subjected to an out-of-control Trump immigration policy. I'm an old Californian who does not accept what the Union has become in the 21st Century.

Perhaps I'm paranoid, but just maybe I have a reason to fear the rise of "A Handmaid's Tale" theonomist judiciary regardless of which of the possible nominees for replacement of Justice Kennedy is selected. And that is because of the majority of the people living in the states on the map below do not even know that the "Star Spangled Banner" was written by an avid advocate of slavery and has a verse attacking escaped slaves:

Scroll up to compare this map with maps indicating the related facts - not that facts matter. And God forbid in this country, which according to a sitting Supreme Court Justice "enshrined protection for the free exercise of religion," we would have a mandatory 8th Grade course on comparative religions so we know what religion is and that it includes Islam and Zoroastrianism (one of the world's oldest extant monotheistic religions which enters recorded history in the 5th-century BCE and is practiced by about 11,000 people in the United States and many facets of which are incorporated into Christianity and Islam).

Or does the makeup of the Court itself and the map above together tell us which religions were actually enshrined and which are just tolerated. And which American citizens are deserving of legal protections?
 

7/10/2018 Update: Nominee Brett Kavanaugh

Somewhat to my surprise President Trump nominated Bret Kavanaugh to replace Justice Kennedy.

As explained above in the original post, some of us think that which religion one was raised in can influence what one believes is right and wrong, one's values are influenced by grade school and high school experiences, adults make judgements based upon their associations with their college professors and fellow university students, as much as they do based on which books they read.

It is very troubling that Kavanaugh's life as can be seen on the chart above adding to the chart in the original post, reads like five of the eight current Supreme Court Justices who were raised Roman Catholic, four of the eight who attended parochial schools, and eight of eight none of whom attended a state institution of higher learning at any time in their college education.

It isn't comforting that Kavanaugh is a regular lector (reader) at his Washington, D.C. church, the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament.

 
According to The Lector at Mass - United States Conference of Catholic Bishops this carefully constrained role is:

    In the procession to the altar, in the absence of a Deacon, the reader, wearing approved attire [see GIRM, no. 339], may carry the Book of the Gospels, slightly elevated. In that case, the reader walks in front of the Priest but otherwise walks along with the other ministers.
    Upon reaching the altar, the reader makes a profound bow with the others [see also GIRM, no. 274]. If he is carrying the Book of the Gospels, he approaches the altar and places the Book of the Gospels upon it. Then the reader takes his own place in the sanctuary with the other ministers. (GIRM, nos. 194-195)
    The reader reads from the ambo the readings that precede the Gospel. In the absence of a psalmist, the reader may also proclaim the Responsorial Psalm after the First Reading.
    In the absence of a Deacon, the reader, after the introduction by the Priest, may announce the intentions of the Universal Prayer from the ambo.
    If there is no singing at the Entrance or at Communion and the antiphons given in the Missal are not recited by the faithful, the reader may read them at an appropriate time (cf. nos. 48, 87). (GIRM, nos. 196-198)
    At the conclusion of the Mass, the lector does not process with the Book of the Gospels. The Lectionary is never carried in procession. The lector may join in the procession at the end of Mass in the same order as in the procession to the altar.

Nor is it comforting that Kavanaugh has tutored at the Washington Jesuit Academy, a Catholic private school in the District of Columbia.

In stark contrast, outgoing Justice Kennedy who Kavanaugh clerked for and would replace has been active off the bench as well, calling for reform of overcrowded American prisons in a speech before the American Bar Association. He spends his summers in Salzburg, Austria, where he teaches international and American law at the University of Salzburg for the McGeorge School of Law of the University of the Pacific (founded in 1851 with a Methodist affiliation) and often attends the large yearly international judges conference held there.

Defending his use of international law, in 2005 Kennedy told The New Yorker staff writer Jeffrey Toobin, "Why should world opinion care that the American Administration wants to bring freedom to oppressed peoples? Is that not because there's some underlying common mutual interest, some underlying common shared idea, some underlying common shared aspiration, underlying unified concept of what human dignity means? I think that's what we're trying to tell the rest of the world, anyway."

Not since Episcopalian David Souter has anyone been on the Court who was not raised in Catholicism or Judaism.

Besides the heavy dose of Catholic upbringing represented on the Court, I have one other problem with this Court. Since the Supreme Court was established in 1789, 113 persons have served on the Court. Of the first 100, 40 had no prior judicial experience. A complete list is below, but the 40 include Earl Warren, William O. Douglas, Felix Frankfurter, and Louis Brandeis, just to name a few whose name some Americans might recognize.

No one appearing on this list has been seated on the Supreme Court since 1972 even though the role of the Supreme Court is radically different than that of a judge.

Supreme Court Justices with No Prior Judicial Experience

California and Kentucky - A tale of two states From Sen. Henry Clay's Compromise of 1850 to Obama's Affordable Care Act

Californians and Kentuckians have one truth in common - neither State shares a cultural identity with another state based on political history. But Californians and Kentuckians have common interests that were in the spotlight in the last seven days.

One is the close relationship between some folks in Cupertino, California, and folks in Harrodsburg, Kentucky - specifically at Apple's headquarters in Silicon Valley and at Corning's glass plant in Kentucky.

Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer, explained to a group of Corning employees on the plant floor Friday that the iPhone originally had plastic on the surface, but when Steve Jobs showed a prototype on the stage in 2007, he kept it in his pocket and by the end of the day the surface was covered with scratches.

Jobs decided that the phone, which was to be released in six months, had to have a glass surface. Every time Apple had tested the iPhone with glass, the glass broke when they dropped it. Shatter resistant glass existed only in Corning's lab. But Corning scrambled and the Harrodsburg plant has been making the Gorilla Glass for iPhones ever since.

Apple announced Friday that it plans to invest $200 million in the Corning Gorilla Glass plant in Harrodsburg. The money will come from Apple’s new Advanced Manufacturing Fund, which the company says will invest $1 billion with U.S.-based companies to develop innovative production and skilled jobs.

The previous Saturday was the 143rd running of the Kentucky Derby as noted in newspapers here in the Northern California Redwoods where we celebrate Seabiscuit. This tie to Kentucky goes much further back than 10 years ago. Seabiscuit was foaled in Lexington, Kentucky, on May 23, 1933 and grew up on Claiborne Farm in Paris, Kentucky, where he was trained.

This links a Wikipedia series about Henry Clay
Early life Legal career Speaker of the House War of 1812 American System Missouri Compromise Second Bank of the United States Bid for the Presidency (1824) Secretary of State Corrupt Bargain Charlotte Dupuy U.S. Senator from Kentucky Nullification Crisis Bid for the Presidency (1832) Whig Party Bid for the Presidency (1844) Compromise of 1850 Death Lying in State

California and Kentucky share some history that goes beyond horse racing. California became a state in 1850 because of Kentuckian Henry Clay.

Tensions between the North and South over the issue of slavery were high in the 1840's. By 1850, after the Mexican-American War, how to handle the former Mexican territory occupied by the United States placed a critical strain.

The Compromise of 1850 was formally proposed by Clay, then a Senator from Kentucky, and guided to passage by Senator Stephen A. Douglas, Democrat of Illinois, over Northern Whig and Southern Democrat opposition. It was enacted September 1850:

1. California was admitted as a free state;
2. Utah Territory and New Mexico Territory were organized with slavery to be decided by popular sovereignty;
3. Texas dropped its claim to land north of the 32nd parallel north and west of the 103rd meridian west in favor of New Mexico Territory, and north of the 36°30' parallel north and east of the 103rd meridian west which became unorganized territory. Texas's boundaries were set at their present form. Senator James Pearce of Maryland drafted the final proposal where Texas ceded its claims to land which later became half of present-day New Mexico, a third of Colorado, and small portions of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Wyoming to the federal government, in return for the assumption of $10 million of the old republic's debt. El Paso, where Texas had established county government, was left in Texas;
4. Slave trade was abolished in Washington, D.C. (but not slavery itself);
5. The Fugitive Slave Act was strengthened.

Of particular concern was California and its gold.

I would guess that fewer than one-in-a-hundred-thousand of persons raised in California know about Henry Clay and the Compromise of 1850. Unfortunately, the in-depth teaching of American History in public schools has not been a priority in California where creating student self-involvement was once prioritized under the euphemism "self-esteem."

A failure to understand each other because of a lack of awareness of how historical context alters culture is significant in the United States.  The history is reflected in the differences in the populations. Compare California's racial/ethnic makeup...


to Kentucky's....
Kentucky's population is 85% non-Hispanic White and 8% non-Hispanic Black, which totals to 93% of the population. California is 39% Hispanic and 14% Asian which total to 53% of the population, while 38% of the population is non-Hispanic White and 6% non-Hispanic Black which total to 44% of the population.

It is almost as if the two states have no history in common. And except for Henry Clay having an important role in their histories, they don't have any important cultural history in common.

As I've explained elsewhere, California was a Spanish colony/Mexican territory from the late 1500's to 1849. On the other hand, Kentucky was part of the British colony/U.S. State of Virginia during that 300 year period. Kentucky has no sea coastline but has the most navigable miles of water in the lower 48 states and is the only U.S. state to have a continuous border of rivers running along three of its sides. California is on the Pacific Rim with 3,427 miles of measured coastline.

These different States embraced he Affordable Care Act  ("ObamaCare") but are now responding to the very knotty public policy problem that (1) it requires additional subsidies by the state government and (2) Congress may replace it.

Both the State of California and the State of Kentucky jumped into program enthusiastically. Despite that fact that in 2013 Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell from Kentucky railed against the Affordable Care Act, calling it a “catastrophic failure” for people everywhere, Kentucky's then Democratic Governor Steve Beshear responded: “I have a U.S. senator who keeps saying Kentuckians don’t want this. Well, the facts don’t prove that out."

In Kentucky, more than 400,000 people gained health insurance through the program, with the highest growth rate of Medicaid coverage of any state.

In late 2013, as McConnell pointed out, it was learned that about 280,000 Kentuckians would have to give up their existing insurance policies and enroll in alternatives that comply with the federal Affordable Care Act. Kentucky Department of Insurance spokeswoman Ronda Sloan said individual policies for about 130,000 people would be discontinued, as would small group policies for about 150,000 more.

Beshear’s successor, Republican Governor Bevin, was elected in 2015 on a promise to repeal and replace the healthcare law on the view that thousands of Kentuckians had unaffordable premiums and only one health insurer to choose from.

Bevin explained: “We want this to be a helping hand for people at a time when they need it, but then be able to return to the commercial marketplace.” Last year, Bevin submitted the waiver to restrict Medicaid eligibility by requiring enrollees to work or volunteer at least 20 hours per week and to pay monthly premiums based on income.

In an ideologically Neoliberal proposal Bevin's plan would take away from Medicaid recipients most eye care and dental benefits but then allow recipients to earn them back based on this chart:

Californians, on the other hand, now have Socialist Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders telling us "Please make my life easier. The great state of California can send a message that will be heard all over this country and all over the world if you pass single-payer here.” (He doesn't tell anyone that in Vermont the Governor and the Legislature are locked in battle because under the Affordable Care Act, virtually all teacher health insurance plans must be re-done to start a new plan on January 1, 2018. But hey, nobody cares that Bernie is politically useless in his home state when it comes to solving problems.)

Indeed the "great state of California" is looking at Senate Bill 562, the Healthy California Act, which for all Californians would cover all medical care, including inpatient, outpatient, emergency care, dental, vision, mental health, nursing home care, eliminate co-pays, insurance deductibles and allow Californians to choose their doctor plus referrals would not be required. (It's tempting to say that also for anyone who loses a tooth, regardless of age a State tooth fairy will leave $1,000 under your pillow....)

A nine-member unpaid board appointed by the governor and Legislature would oversee the health system. An advisory committee, consisting of doctors, nurses, consumers and other health care providers, also would guide public policy.

The state would seek waivers from the federal government for Medi-Cal (Medicaid), the Children’s Health Insurance Program, Medicare, and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to offset the cost of the program. But how to pay the substantive balance of the cost has yet to be proposed.

The last California single-payer proposal was introduced in 2007. Estimates indicated it would have cost the state $209.8 billion rising to as much as $252 billion in 2015, according a fiscal analysis by the Legislative Analyst’s Office. The plan included an 8% wage tax on employers and 4% on employees. Based on now known medical care cost increases since 2007, the tax for that plan would have to have been raised substantially, probably some number like 12% on both employers and employees. And the plan was not as comprehensive as the new proposal. It was vetoed by then Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Democratic Governor Jerry Brown when in Washington lobbying about the billions his state could lose on the eve of the House Republican vote to repeal and replace Obamacare said regarding SB562: “Where do you get the extra money? This is the whole question. I don’t even get ... how do you do that? This is called ‘the unknown by means of the more unknown.' In other words, you take a problem, and say ‘I am going to solve it by something that’s ... a bigger problem,’ which makes no sense.”

The reality is that Social Security and Medicare are mostly funded by taxes on wages, partly paid by employers and by employees. Make no mistake about it, any single-payer plan in California will require additional such taxes. And no it won't come from "the rich" as California already has a billionaire-income-tax supporting its deficit budget in a significant amount.

It is a deficit budget, worse than expected as Brown’s administration miscalculated costs for Medi-Cal by $1.9 billion in the 2016-17 budget. The Democratic governor called for more than $3 billion in budget cuts in 2017-18 because of a projected deficit he pegged at $1.6 billion for that year. The massive hole in the Medi-Cal budget surprised state lawmakers.

Since it is likely that California will see reductions in federal support for Medi-Cal within the next few years, it's going to be interesting to watch "liberal" Californian's deal with taxes. Because in 2017 the Democrats controlled ⅔'s of the votes in both houses of the Legislature, a very large gasoline tax increase was approved to do badly needed road maintenance. Now a ballot measure has been proposed to have the voters repeal the gas tax increase.

Without a ⅔'s vote in each house of the Legislature any health care taxes, like all California tax proposals, must be approved  by the voters.

Assuming a tax on wages is proposed, because the State has fumbled a lot of programs over the past two decades, it will be interesting to see if the over-65, most of whom wouldn't be taxed, would consider supporting the measure. Or would the Legislature run into a wall old protestors with signs saying "Keep the STATE GOVERNMENT out of my Medicare." My guess is that would happen if the bill continues to propose to interfere with Medicare.

And of course they would have to get it past voters who have good employer-sponsored health plans. What's the slogan going to be - "Trust Us State Officials to Get Healthcare Right!...even though we risked too much with the Affordable Care Act and now can't even pay that bill."

Consider this problem. In order to pay for health care for a child in a poor family whose Facebook page you don't follow, it might prevent you from buying the next iPhone, as you do each year. That could negatively impact workers in Kentucky.

Which interestingly brings us back to Kentucky's Senator, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who according to a newspaper report noted he had nothing to do with Apple’s investment but came to the plant for the announcement to congratulate the company.

“The last thing I look at at night and the first thing I look at in the morning is my iPhone,” McConnell said. “And unlike most people, I think of Harrodsburg, Kentucky.”

So do some people in Cupertino, Senator.  But why do I doubt you ever think of them?

The Chilling Trump Civil War Blurt-Blat About that cruel slave owner Jackson and the genocide of Native Americans

This week's Trumpist is actually President Donald Trump. If he weren't President it would be hard to be critical of him for what he said even though it is easy to criticize what he said. He is just a typical American completely unfamiliar with the facts of American history while repeating the mythology of that history:

    TRUMP: [President Andrew Jackson] was a swashbuckler. But when his wife died, did you know he visited her grave everyday? I visited her grave actually because I was in Tennessee.
    ZITO: That's right. You were in Tennessee.
    TRUMP: And it was amazing. The people of Tennessee are amazing people. They love Andrew Jackson. They love Andrew Jackson in Tennessee.
    ZITO: He's fascinating.
    TRUMP: I mean, had Andrew Jackson been a little later, you wouldn't have had the Civil War. He was a very tough person, but he had a big heart. He was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War. He said, “There's no reason for this.” People don't realize, you know, the Civil War — if you think about it, why? People don't ask that question, but why was there a Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?

First of all, Andrew Jackson may be loved by some in Tennessee, but in fact historically he was the Englishic-American who most successfully advocated for the inclusion of the genocide of Native Americans in U.S. policy.

Second, Andrew Jackson died in 1845, 16 years before the Civil War started. It is fair to assume he would not have compromised on slavery as this hero of white supremacy was a rabid, cruel slave owner as indicated in this ad to recover one of his slaves who ran away offering an additional "ten dollars extra for every hundred lashes any person will give him, to the amount of three hundred dollars":

Of course, context is important. When he became President, four of his six predecessors were slave owners even while in office. In fact, of the first 18 Presidents, 8 (in red) owned slaves during their Presidency, 5 (in green) owned slaves some other time in their lives, 5 (in blue) never owned slaves:

1. George Washington
2. John Adams
3. Thomas Jefferson
4. James Madison
5. James Monroe
6. John Quincy Adams
7. Andrew Jackson
8. Martin Van Buren
9. William Henry Harrison
10. John Tyler
11. James K. Polk
12. Zachary Taylor
13. Millard Fillmore
14. Franklin Pierce
15. James Buchanan
16. Abraham Lincoln
17. Andrew Johnson
18. Ulysses S. Grant

And if context is important, compared to the generals on the Union side in 1861, Jackson was a pretty competent general. So perhaps had he been alive and well in 1861 today we might be talking about two countries. That really would have made him popular in today's Tennessee.

Trump's belief that Jackson could have negotiated to avoid the war reflects a poor understanding of the difference in the Southern populism that led to Jackson's election and the Northern populism that led to Lincoln's election. In Trump's case the Rust Belt - Deep South populism he rode to victory had much in common with Jackson's victory.

I hope Trump's blurt-blat only reflects a troubling overall American ignorance. But I fear that deep-down it reflects a chilling property-ownership economic slant of Trump which parallels Jackson when it comes to workers. Perhaps it is both.

It is chilling to me as a Californian because the most recent legalized slavery in the United States is deeply embedded in Trumpist anti-Mexican rhetoric. It brings up memories associated with this 1966 Phil Ochs song:

                                Bracero

Wade into the river, through the rippling shallow waters
Steal across the thirsty border, bracero
Come bring your hungry body to the golden fields of plenty
From a peso to a penny, bracero

Oh, welcome to California
Where the friendly farmers will take care of you

Come labor for your mother, for your father and your brother
For your sisters and your lover, bracero
Come pick the fruits of yellow, break the flowers from the berries
Purple grapes will fill your bellies, bracero

Oh, welcome to California
Where the friendly farmers will take care of you

And the sun will bite your body, as the dust will draw you thristy
While your muscles beg for mercy, bracero
In the shade of your sombrero, drop your sweat upon the soil
Like the fruit your youth can spoil, bracero

Oh, welcome to California
Where the friendly farmers will take care of you

When the weary night embraces, sleep in shacks that could be cages
They will take it from your wages, bracero
Come sing about tomorrow with a jingle of the dollars
And forget your crooked collar, bracero

Oh, welcome to California
Where the friendly farmers will take care of you

And the local men are lazy, and they make too much of trouble
Besides we'd have to pay them double, bracero
Ah, but if you feel you're fallin', if you find the pace is killing
There are others who are willing, bracero

Oh, welcome to California
Where the friendly farmer will take care of you

The term "slavery" in the 21st Century United States is associated with racism. In fact, in human history while slavery frequently is associated with with some variation on tribalism or extended tribalism. But in U.S. history it is ongoing within the competitive private property economic system embraced by Americans and the United States Constitution. From the Wikipedia entry:

    Slavery is, in the strictest sense of the term, any system in which principles of property law are applied to people, allowing individuals to own, buy and sell other individuals, as a de jure form of property. A slave is unable to withdraw unilaterally from such an arrangement and works without remuneration. Many scholars now use the term chattel slavery to refer to this specific sense of legalised, de jure slavery. In a broader sense, however, the word slavery may also refer to any situation in which an individual is de facto forced to work against his or her will. Scholars also use the more generic terms such as unfree labour or forced labour, to refer to such situations. However – and especially under slavery in broader senses of the word – slaves may have some rights and/or protections, according to laws and/or customs.
    Slavery began to exist before written history, in many cultures. A person could become a slave from the time of their birth, capture, or purchase.
    While slavery was institutionally recognized by most societies, it has now been outlawed in all recognized countries, the last being Mauritania in 2007. Nevertheless, there are still more slaves today than at any previous point in history: an estimated 45 million people remain enslaved worldwide. The most common form of the slave trade is now commonly referred to as human trafficking. Chattel slavery is also still practiced by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. In other areas, slavery (or unfree labour) continues through practices such as debt bondage, serfdom, domestic servants kept in captivity, certain adoptions in which children are forced to work as slaves, child soldiers, and forced marriage.
    Evidence of slavery predates written records, and has existed in many cultures. Slavery is rare among hunter-gatherer populations because it requires economic surpluses and a high population density to be viable. This, although it has existed among unusually resource-rich hunter gatherers, such as the American Indian peoples of the salmon-rich rivers of the Pacific Northwest Coast, slavery became widespread only with the invention of agriculture during the Neolithic Revolution about 11,000 years ago.
    Slavery was known in almost every ancient civilization and society.

It is not hard to imagine a modern economic system of several classes which includes a corporate ownership class and a corporate-owned slave class. In such a system if the dominate morality required best-of-care for slaves, the corporations allowed to own slaves would provide adequate housing, food, clothing, transportation, quality health care, entertainment, etc., for every slave from infancy through old-age.

In a different economic system, we now require the ownership class to pay wages to employees only when profitable work is available. As several economists have determined from the economic modeling of slavery, it is cheaper to let the children of the working class go without healthcare. If you owned them as valuable property, you'd have to adequately provide for them.

Economists do not model morality, of course. And most certainly, politicians do not, including the Trumpists.

As I noted in the prior post, Wall Street financiers, commercial shippers, and merchants all had economic interests in the South maintaining its slave-based economy. In the wake of the Compromise of 1850 which resulted in California's admittance to the Union, the Union Safety Committee was created in New York City and pledged “to resist every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest.” As current Wall Street financiers (many of whom are in Trump's cabinet), would say "it's economics, you see...."

It has been said that Churchill's quote near the beginning of this post paraphrased this one...

The difference is that Churchill assumed people might be taught history. Santayana assumed people would notice what's going on around them to learn from the errors of their grandparents' generation, the errors of their parents' generation, and their own accumulating errors.

Neither anticipated 21st Century American Trumpists....

The Chilling Blurt-Blats of Trumpists Jeff Sessions' Hawaii Incident reminds us to heed Sun Tzu's The Art of War

Politics in a democracy is a war, of sorts. Or rather it is a substitute for killing each other in power struggles related to economics (wealth and property) and beliefs (religion, ideology, tribe).

The Art of War is an ancient Chinese military treatise dating from the 5th century BC attributed to the Chinese military strategist and philosopher General Sun Tzu. As noted in Wikipedia, much of the text is about how to fight wars without actually having to do battle. It gives tips on how to outsmart one's opponent so that physical battle is not necessary. As such, it has found application as a training guide for many competitive endeavors that do not involve actual combat.

As with too many things in American culture, we kinda, sorta think we know about The Art of War. That is foolish because it is a long philosophical treatise that does not lend itself to the common American understanding limit of 140 characters. For instance, many Americans are aware of "know your enemy" when in fact the wisdom as shown in the image above is:

    So it is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be put at risk even in a hundred battles. If you only know yourself, but not your opponent, you may win or may lose. If you know neither yourself nor your enemy, you will always endanger yourself.

In the context of an "opponent" in a competition outside of a physical battle, "know your enemy" means to understand how they likely will respond to the changing circumstances within which they find themselves. To know your enemy, you must know their frame of reference, their "structure of concepts, values, customs, views, etc., by means of which an individual or group perceives or evaluates data, communicates ideas, and regulates behavior."

Everyone has a frame of reference based on a lifetime of experience which sets their standards for judging the world - their perspective, their way of looking at things. Among the elements of a lifetime that create a frame of reference in childhood and adolescence are

1. the importance of kinship, lineage, and affinity groups and
2. the cultural quiescence within the hometown region.

These influences can be clearly heard in the blurts and blats that emanate from the Trumpists - members of Donald Trump's team. If I as a Californian really listen to them, I find that trumpeting disturbing.

But, when Trumpists blurt and blat, I know those are an expression of their frames of reference as is my varied and many reactions. In such a case it is important to "know" them and equally important to "know" ourselves.

Last week the Trump-appointed United States Attorney General Jeff Sessions made this comment about a federal judge in the state of Hawaii:

     "I really am amazed that a judge sitting on an island in the Pacific can issue an order that stops the president of the United States from what appears to be clearly his statutory and constitutional power."

Despite the subsequent repugnant (to me) discussions and defenses offered that he was just attacking the judicial branch, his statement clearly sounds like he meant to minimize the place - an island in the pacific, maybe U.S. territory, but surely not a place entitled to membership in the exclusive country club known as These United States.

It wasn't a comment that would be outside of Trumpist Session's frame of reference. But as a fellow American whose frame of reference is Californian, I must consider Jeff Sessions' frame of reference in the context of his childhood and adolescence from the facts of

1. the importance of kinship, lineage, and affinity groups and
2. the cultural quiescence within the hometown region.

It isn't just that Sessions was born and raised in, and lived most of his life in, Alabama, a geographic region historically different from California, though that might give a hint. It isn't just that since the early 1700's no male in his paternal lineage ever called home a place outside the southernmost part These United States:

Click on image to see a larger version!

Rather it's all that plus the fact that his great-grandfather died at the Battle of Antietam fighting for the South in the Civil War, and that his grandfather, his father, and he are all named "Jefferson Beauregard" Sessions...

• as in Jefferson Davis was selected as President of the Confederacy at the constitutional convention in Montgomery, Alabama. 
• as in Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard.

Now I know those names were commonly used among white families in the South after the Civil War. And I know that Jeff Sessions didn't name himself. But most other people likely will not share a perspective, a way of looking at things, with Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III - including most any American whose lineage includes no one from the Slave States indicated in the map below:

However....

Early 19th Century American history isn't as simple as that. Among many people where Sessions was born and raised, there is a shared belief that any state within the land area not a U.S. state before the Missouri Compromise in 1819 indicated in the map below has a somewhat-less-than-equal standing relative to Alabama...

Click on image to see a larger version!

...because in 1819 when Alabama became a state, there were 11 Free States and 11 Slave States. The open furious political/ideological debate after 1819 - regarding what would be allowed in the frame of reference in new states not on the map above - ended after about 1 million Americans were killed in the Civil War.

For many in the South, "These United States" of 1819 was the last map of the nation formed in 1789 pursuant to the 1790 Census Map. The brutal reality of that map is subconsciously embedded in the frame of reference of many who live in those pink states today

However, while the Civil War as a series of physical battles ended on April 9, 1865, when General Lee surrendered at the village of Appomattox Court House, it could be said that the last battle casualty of the Civil War occurred five days later on April 14, 1865, when President Lincoln was shot.

As an aside, the last Confederate General to surrender his forces was Cherokee leader Stand Watie, on June 23, 1865 - while many 21st Century Americans think the only issue of the Civil War was black slavery, members of the Cherokee nation, which was subject to the genocide policies of the United States that continued into the 20th Century, would disagree. Anyway....

So what gut response would you expect from Sessions about a judge on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean overturning a Presidential Order??? Particularly when the response is from someone like Sessions who was in elementary school in Alabama when former California Governor Chief Justice Earl Warren ordered an end to desegregation???

Think about this frame of reference.When the land that makes up most of Alabama became part of the nation under what we know first 13 States pursuant to our Constitution in 1789, slavery was legal in 8 of 13 states, including 87% of the new nation's land area and holding 63% of the population.¹ 

When you look at that 1790 map, you may not realize that of the states shown, 75 years later the strongest support in the North for going to war came from New England states and Pennsylvania. Further, consider the irony in the fact that Donald Trump's New York City historically liked to sell stuff to the Sessions and their neighbors:

    ...From Wall Street financiers, to commercial shippers, to merchants selling manufactured goods to a South that produced little of its own, the New York City economy depended heavily on southern cotton. In response to the divisive Compromise of 1850, a group of merchants formed the Union Safety Committee, which pledged “to resist every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest.” During the war years, Mayor Fernando Wood, a “Peace Democrat,” led opposition to the war in the city, which grew as the wartime economy floundered and casualties mounted.

Based on their frames of reference, it's a given that Jeff Sessions and his boss don't understand Californians with their legal pot and their immigrants and their (at least from many like me) constant doubt that the United States is anything more than a fraudulent spin when it comes to liberty and justice for all, much less when it comes to equality.

That some non-white judge from Hawaii overturned the travel ban against some non-Christian brown people must be particularly galling to Trumpists even though the Senate, including Sessions, unanimously confirmed Derrick K. Watson. Maybe when he voted then Senator Sessions didn't know that the "K" stood for the middle name Kahala reflecting Judge Watson's frame of reference differences from a Southerner whose middle name is Beauregard.

When the judge was confirmed it was noted that he became the fourth person of Native Hawaiian descent to serve as an Article III judge in American history. Also the District of Hawaii became the first federal court in U.S. history with a majority of Asian Pacific Americans, as Judge Watson joined Chief Judge Susan Oki Mollway and Judge Leslie Kobayashi on the bench. At the time of Watson’s confirmation, Hawaii Congresswoman and Chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus Judy Chu said:

    I am thrilled that the Senate has voted to confirm Derrick Kahala Watson’s nomination to the U.S. District Court. This decision continues a significant trend of working to ensure that our federal judiciary reflects the diversity of the American people. Judge Watson is a strong addition to the federal bench, and will surely be a great public servant for the people of Hawaii.

Watson, whose mother worked in a bank and father was a Honolulu police officer, after attending the the Kamehameha Schools became the first in his family to attend college getting his undergraduate degree at Harvard. Like Sessions in his native Alabama, Watson has deep roots in Hawaii, growing up in a multi-generational household on Oahu.  Of course, Watson's Harvard Law graduating class included Barack Obama and Neil Gorsuch.

An interesting non-Sessions perspective on Watson's ruling was offered in this article:

    There are indications, though, that Watson’s viewpoint may have been further influenced by his Hawaiian heritage and his long record of advocacy for immigrant rights and civil rights. While with a San Francisco law firm in the early 2000s, he devoted hundreds of hours to pro bono cases defending the rights of Mexican restaurant workers being held in slave-like conditions and to landlord-tenant disputes.
    The complaint filed by Hawaii’s attorney general against the Trump travel ban contained an explicit reference to some of the most painful chapters in the islands’ history – the Chinese Exclusion Acts and the imposition of martial law and internment of Japanese Americans following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. At the time, the US supreme court upheld the government’s argument – similar to Trump’s – that it had the executive authority to defend national security as it saw fit. But the court’s ruling in Korematsu v United States has since been described as a “stain on American jurisprudence” and has been widely repudiated in federal court rulings if never explicitly overturned.
    “If you have an order taking us back half a century to a time when there was discrimination on the basis of national origin or religion,” Hawaii’s attorney general, Doug Chin, told reporters after Watson’s ruling, “that’s something we have to speak up against.”

Jeff Sessions is two years younger than me. The fact is I too have a frame of reference based on the culture of my home state, California. Also I was heavily influenced by the fact that while my Irish Catholic family members were serving in WWII, when stationed in the South they suffered discrimination from Sessions family compatriots. We understood the reality of the 1881 observation written in a letter by British historian Edward Freeman on his return from America:

    This would be a grand land if only every Irishman would kill a Negro, and be hanged for it. I find this sentiment generally approved - sometimes with the qualification that they want Irish and Negroes for servants, not being able to get any other.

When I was 2 years old, then California Governor Earl Warren supported the integration of Mexican-American students in California school systems following Mendez v. Westminster. I was in elementary school when then Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Earl Warren wrote the opinion for Brown v Board of Education. Some of my California high school classmates were born in Japanese-American internment camps. A lot of my California high school classmates were Mexican-Americans.

Why anyone would care about a 19th Century American Civil War in the 21st Century is a mystery to me. The South lost. Get over it. But I also recognize the depth of feelings in Sessions frame of reference.

Most Americans today do not live in the states indicated on the 1790 map above. But wherever they live, what Americans need to learn from history is that our American progenitors screwed up, a lot. They got a lot wrong, more than they got right. We need to forgive our American ancestors, but not make mistakes based on their stupidity. That particularly goes for Trumpists who have acquired political power, such as U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

California Senate Majority Leader Kevin de León when challenging Sessions' threats against Sanctuary Cities was partly correct when he stated:

    It has become abundantly clear that Atty. Gen. [Jeff] Sessions and the Trump administration are basing their law enforcement policies on principles of white supremacy — not American values. Their constant and systematic targeting of diverse cities and states goes beyond constitutional norms and will be challenged at every level.

He is right that the policies reflect white supremacist values. What he fails to openly recognize is not that Sessions and Trump and the Deplorables are white supremacists, but that they are Americans reflecting their values as Americans - American values that consistently go back to 17th Century America. It is clear to me that Sessions' frame of reference retains in him a concept of America that is chilling.

That's a problem for 21st Century residents of Hawaii and California. When a country permits persons with this frame of reference to hold office because of a failed democratic election that gave such persons power not only with less than a majority vote but with fewer votes than the other candidate, the result may be legal but it is a literal threat to non-white Americans.

When "the other" appears on their radar, the Trumpists would be as comfortable as their 1940's predecessors carrying out a racist act under the color of law.

It would be a racist act similar to putting Japanese-Americans in concentration camps because their ancestors lived in a country with which America is at war, while not imprisoning German-Americans nor Italian-Americans.

We so spin this in our history classes that we don't recognize that this happened not because of any danger to our country but because Germans and Italians are white Europeans while the Japanese are Asians.

By spinning it in our grade school and high school classes by not noticing what we didn't do to German-Americans and Italian-Americans, we won't recognize as our core beliefs the tenants of white supremacy when we do it again, such as that Trump immigration order which is clearly a white supremacist act carried out under the guise of threat from "the other."

Not only that, but it is likely that today's Supreme Court full of white Catholic men would uphold it in the name of safety and security despite facts to the contrary.

That's the country Jeff Sessions and Donald Trump and the Deplorables want to live in and actually live in.

As a Californian I have a problem with that kind of America. It was less than 100 years ago, in 1881 when British historian Edward Freeman made his observation about America quoted above, from When Italian immigrants were 'the other' we learn:

    The largest mass lynching in U.S. history took place in New Orleans in 1891 — and it wasn’t African-Americans who were lynched, as many of us might assume. It was Italian-Americans.
    After nine Italians were tried and found not guilty of murdering New Orleans Police Chief David Hennessy, a mob dragged them from the jail, along with two other Italians being held on unrelated charges, and lynched them all. The lynchings were followed by mass arrests of Italian immigrants throughout New Orleans, and waves of attacks against Italians nationwide.
    What was the reaction of our country’s leaders to the lynchings? Teddy Roosevelt, not yet president, famously said they were “a rather good thing.” The response in The New York Times was worse. A March 16, 1891, editorial referred to the victims of the lynchings as “… sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins.” An editorial the next day argued that: “Lynch law was the only course open to the people of New Orleans. …”
    John Parker, who helped organize the lynch mob, later went on to be governor of Louisiana. In 1911, he said of Italians that they were “just a little worse than the Negro, being if anything filthier in [their] habits, lawless, and treacherous.”

If you think Sessions' and Trump's America is different, the writer of that article points out:

    ...In earlier centuries, Catholics in America were in a position similar to today's Muslims. In 1785, when Catholics proposed building St. Peter's Church in the heart of Manhattan, city officials, fearing the papacy and sinister foreign influences, forced them to relocate outside the city limits. In this incident, it's easy to hear echoes of the Murfreesboro protests where there is opposition to the building of a mosque, as well as the ongoing protests against an Islamic center proposed for 51 Park Place in contemporary Manhattan.
    On December 24, 1806, two decades after St. Peter's was built on Church Street, where it still stands, protesters surrounded the church, outraged by mysterious ceremonies going on inside, ceremonies we now commonly understand to be the celebration of Christmas. The Christmas Eve 1806 protest led to a riot in which dozens were injured and a policeman was killed.

When in 2016 San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick in protest of racial oppression and inequality in the United States knelt during the playing of the Star Spangled Banner, Session's and Trump's America went on the attack in outrage. At no time did, or would, the Deplorables ever wonder why because they and Trump revel in ignorance. As I explained elsewhere, The Star-Spangled Banner is something we should know about but don't because its pro-slavery verse written by a racist slave-owner who thought the British would take away his slaves is deliberately hidden from us.

Read this post About that Star-Spangled Banner.... Remember that this occurred in 2016, not 1816 or 1916, and it was a Californian who came under attack, the same year Donald Trump was legally elected President.

My frame of reference created in me values demonstrated by the actions of Watson and Kaepernick. I know that we are in a political war with "another America" over those values. So when I hear...

THE CONSTANTLY TRUMPETING TRUMPISTS

...I know the effect will be chilling. meaning those blurts and blats will create a feeling of sudden fear, anxiety, or alarm. It is the threat that underlies my statement in the prior post here Regarding "When We Rise" - How history repeats itself and why we must protect "San Francisco Values":

    How much does middle America respect San Francisco Values? It appears that answer is "not at all." When one realizes that San Francisco Values include love, peace, tolerance, diversity, creativity, freedom, spirituality, prosperity, community, truth, justice, and care for the environment it is a little hard to understand why anyone would not respect San Francisco Values.

But if we understand a frame of reference that is structured around 1790 Christian Old Testament tribal values (not the teachings of Jesus) and 1990 Selfish Capitalism tribal values, we do understand the enemy as recommended by Sun Tzu.

__________________________

Footnotes:
¹Any time you don't understand American politics, remember that some 75 years after the ratification of the Constitution in order to amend slavery out of the Constitution, the North under the leadership of Abraham Lincoln decided to take the risk to kill 1 million Americans, more than half from slave states including Jeff Sessions great-grandfather. And there is nothing factually untrue about that statement.

Many feel that strong evidence exists that Americans on both sides did not understand that hundreds of thousands would die. That is true. As with every truth about the general population in a democracy, the voters were basically ignorant about what was at stake, so they voted with their ignorance. The fact is, in 1860 most would not have read the poem The Charge of the Light Brigade an 1854 narrative poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson about the Charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaclava during the Crimean War. Nor would they have seen the photograph titled Valley Of The Shadow Of Death snapped by British photographer Roger Fenton in 1855:

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
   Volleyed and thundered;
Stormed at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of hell
   Rode the six hundred.

One of the truths of American history is that many leading American politicians were well aware of the Crimean War, one of the first conflicts to use modern technologies such as explosive shells, railways, telegraphs, nursing, etc. They knew the likely future reality:

    The Civil War is often to referred as the first "modern" war in history as it included the most advanced technology and innovations of warfare available at the time. Some of the innovations and advances of the Civil War included mass production of war material, rifling of gun barrels and the use of the Minié ball, the advent of repeating firearms and metallic cartridges, ironclad warships, advances in medicine, communication (especially the telegraph), and transportation (railroads), and the gradual decline of tactics from previous centuries.

Because, of course, too many Americans today choose their ignorance of history, most are not aware that in 1863, when the Russian Baltic fleet arrived in New York harbor, the Russian Far East fleet arrived in San Francisco. This was probably the most important Civil War related event to occur in California.

Late in the Civil War, the Confederate cruiser CSS Shenandoah was operating in the Bering Sea, where the unarmed, unsuspecting New Bedford whaling fleet hunted the gray whales. Over the course of a few days, 24 vessels were captured – most burned, the rest loaded with prisoners and sent into San Francisco. American whaling never recovered. Without a reliable supply of inexpensive whale oil as a smokeless lamp fuel and premium lubricant, there was now a vast new market for kerosene distilled from that nasty black stuff that oozed out of the ground in Pennsylvania: petroleum.

When an attack on San Francisco by the Shenandoah seemed to be imminent, the Russian admiral there gave orders to his ships to defend the city if necessary. There were no major Union warships on the scene, so Russia was about to fight for the United States. The attack never came as the bloodiest war in history up to that time came to a close.

The point here is American politicians and generals on both sides of the dispute in 1860 were not ignorant of the risk demonstrated by the Crimean War. In fact, John Basil Turchin, a Union army brigadier general in the American Civil War who led two critical charges that saved the day at Chickamauga and was among the first to lead soldiers up Missionary Ridge, was Ivan Vasilyevich Turchaninov. He was a Russian immigrant and former Colonel of Staff in the Russian Guards who fought in the Crimean War.

They well understood that hundreds of thousands of Americans would die in a Civil War.