The Supreme Court of the United States has settled two important matters, one involving gay marriage and the other involving voting rights. But as the country approaches its July 4th Independence Day holiday, traditionally a midsummer moment of unity and good feeling, the country seems unusually unsettled.
Contributing to that feeling are two factors: There is the economic crisis, continuing despite some green shoots of optimism that seemed to contradict the behaviour of the financial markets in much of June. And there is the Washington crisis, a stubborn paralysis that has transformed the definition of politics from ``the art of the possible'' (Bismarck's view) to the ``artless pursuit of the improbable'' (my definition, made up here at the keyboard just now, but done so without fear of contradiction).
But there is something more as well, and it dominates the American spirit at this holiday season.
The Supreme Court's decisions on gay marriage and voting rights were its final salvos before its summer recess, and both struck at the heart of the American credo, which can be distilled to the cultivation and expansion of rights. All of American history--or at least the most enduring and defining elements of US history that aren't about taxes--is a fight about rights: who has them, where they come from, whether to grow them, how to define them.
So in giving oxygen to the remarkably swift race to enshrine gay marriage in law--more than a quarter of states now recognize this, up from none only a few years ago--and in retreating from federal supervision in certain states on the process of voting, the Supreme Court set the national conversation only a week before the fireworks and charcoal grills were to be lit.
No American social movement has progressed with so much success with so much speed as the drive to provide equal rights for gays--far quicker than its predecessor struggles.
The fight for rights for blacks was set in 1619 with the arrival of the first slaves in colonial Virginia and still is not fully redeemed, though the Civil War (1861-1865), the Civil Rights Movement (roughly 1954 to 1967), and the election of Barack Obama (44th president, 2007-present) were important markers of progress. That is why the photograph late last week [cq: June 27] of Mr. Obama standing at the Door of No Return in Senegal--where slaves once passed before boarding ships for America--was so chilling and poignant.
The fight for rights for women might have begun with Abigail Adams' March 1776 ``Remember the ladies'' letter to her husband John Adams, the patriot leader. It took flight with the Seneca Falls Declaration (1848) and female suffrage (19th Amendment, 1920), but pay and opportunity gaps remain.
The modern fight for gay rights has its roots in many 19th century American social reform movements but really accelerated with the Stonewall Riots in New York in 1969. In the 21st century alone the issues of gays in the military and, now, gay marriage have become mainstream issues with astonishing speed. The percentage of Americans living in states where gay marriage is legal has doubled in a year, reaching about 30 percent in the past week. (But 37 states still do not permit marriage between couples of the same sex, and the Supreme Court decision did not force them to change their positions.)
Americans' bedrock rights were added to the United States Constitution only after the Constitutional Convention adjourned, with the passage of the first 10 amendments, known as the Bill of Rights. But since they were adopted, in 1791, they have been the spirit of the American system and of American civic life.
Their impact has reached farther than America's borders, however. A study by David S. Law and Mila Versteeg published last year in the New York University Law Review showed that 97 percent of constitutions worldwide enshrine rights much like the American rights. Even so, the US Constitution is in decline globally as a model for oth actions' constitutions, in large part, that same study shows, because only 12 percent of nations today have constitutions with forms of federalism like that in the United States.
Indeed, it is the American principle of federalism that has made these two Supreme Court decisions so unsettling.
For nearly a half century, special government attention has been brought to bear on the states, mainly in the South, where voting-rights procedures were subject to unusual scrutiny. For the last several years, the advances in gay rights have taken place at the state level, but not, pointedly, in every state nor at the national level.
Now struggles growing directly out of the peculiarly American brand of federalism are at the center of political life in the United States; liberals, for example, generally support the idea of separate state standards on voting rights but would prefer a national standard embracing gay rights, with many (but not all) conservatives taking the opposite view. Seldom has the collision between these two fundamentals of American life--the notion of federalism and the spirit of rights--been as vivid as it is in this summer of settled law and unsettled citizens.
David Shribman, executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of U.S. politics.