Our Best Selves
It was a warm and cloudy Friday in the nation’s capital. At 11:14 a.m. on June 26, 2015, the president entered the Rose Garden to deliver scheduled remarks concerning the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling on marriage equality, handed down an hour earlier.
It was a historic day. “Our nation was founded on a bedrock principle that we are all created equal,” President Barack Obama said. “The project of each generation is to bridge the meaning of those founding words with the realities of changing times — a never-ending quest to ensure those words ring true for every single American.”
“Progress on this journey often comes in small increments, sometimes two steps forward, one step back, propelled by the persistent effort of dedicated citizens. And then sometimes, there are days like this when that slow, steady effort is rewarded with justice that arrives like a thunderbolt.”
“This morning,” Obama added, “the Supreme Court recognized that the Constitution guarantees marriage equality. In doing so, they’ve reaffirmed that all Americans are entitled to the equal protection of the law.”
The issue at hand was the realization of “basic civil rights.” The court’s decision reaffirmed a self-evident truth that echoes throughout the ages—there is no freedom without equal justice. “When all Americans are treated as equals, we are all more free,” the president said.
It’s a truth inscribed on the Supreme Court building: “Equal justice under law.” And it’s the lifeblood of democracy. “Everyone is equal before the law … [and] we keep the law,” Pericles told Athenians. “This is because it commands our deep respect.”
John Locke wrote that the people should be governed by “laws, not to be varied in particular cases, but to have one rule for rich and poor, for the favorite at court, and the countryman at plow.” Such laws, he added, “ought to be designed for no other end ultimately, but the good of the people.”
The founders took note. The Massachusetts Constitution, written in 1780 by John Adams, declared “all are born free and equal” and that “it is essential to the preservation of the rights of every individual… that there be an impartial interpretation of the laws, and administration of justice.”
In 2003, Massachusetts became the first state to recognize same-sex marriage. First principles, Chief Justice Margaret Marshall ruled, “affirms the dignity and equality of all individuals.” It was not a moral question; it was a constitutional one. “Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code,” she quoted.
Similarly, Justice Kennedy wrote in Obergefell, “They [the petitioners] ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.”
But the triumph of the day was joined by a reflection on the tragic grace of God. Nine days earlier, a white supremacist entered an AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and shot and killed nine people, including the Reverend Clementa Pinckney.
Just hours after his remarks on marriage equality, President Obama flew to South Carolina and delivered a eulogy for Pinckney in Charleston.
“Out of this terrible tragedy, God has visited grace upon us, for he has allowed us to see where we’ve been blind,” he said. “He has given us the chance, where we’ve been lost, to find our best selves.”
As day became night back in Washington, the White House shined bright with rainbow colors. It was a poetic conclusion to a powerful day in our history; amidst the tragedy of death and the lingering forces of hate, America chose its better self and reaffirmed its first principles.
In 1965, Martin Luther King hoped that America “would be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom of justice.”
In June 2015, America was shaken but not beaten. Hate and death reared their ugly heads. But we overcame. Our better selves triumphed because, as King said, “the arc of a moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
And again, we carried on.