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. “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.”
It was a historic day. “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.” Obama added, “This morning, 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.
Obama acknowledged the controversy surrounding the ruling. “I know that Americans of goodwill continue to hold a wide range of views on this issue,” he said. “Opposition in some cases has been based on sincere and deeply held beliefs. All of us who welcome today’s news should be mindful of that fact; recognize different viewpoints; revere our deep commitment to religious freedom.”
Still, the president added, “We are big and vast and diverse; a nation of people with different backgrounds and beliefs, different experiences and stories, but bound by our shared ideal that no matter who you are or what you look like, how you started off, or how and who you love, America is a place where you can write your own destiny. We are a people who believe that every single child is entitled to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
It is a maxim of free society that echoes throughout the ages, from the orations of Pericles to the writings of John Locke to the constitution-making of John Adams, and it rightly adorns the front of the United States 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 less a moral question than it was a constitutional one. “Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code,” she quoted; surely all would agree that basic morality insists that all be treated as they want to be treated.
“The dynamic of our constitutional system is that individuals need not await legislative action before asserting a fundamental right,” Chief Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the Supreme Court’s majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges. “They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.”
But the triumph of love led to a reflection on the tragedy of hate. Nine days earlier, on June 17, a white supremacist entered the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and shot and killed nine black Americans, including the state senator and 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. “As a nation, 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.”
“For too long, we’ve been blind to the way past injustices continue to shape the present. Perhaps we see that now,” Obama said. The president then broke out in song. “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me; I once was lost, but now I’m found; was blind but now I see.”
As day became night back in Washington, D.C., 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 specters of hate, America chose its better self, reaffirmed its first principles, and chose to let liberty and love light the way forward.
In 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., 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 and justice.”
“Today,” Obama had said from the Rose Garden, “we can say in no uncertain terms that we’ve made our union a little more perfect.”
The arc of a moral universe may be long, but in June 2015, it bent a little more toward justice.