Partisan Buckets

I've been focusing on our contemporary struggles as partisans in a coarsening of our shared civic lives. Do you remember John Roberts during his consent hearing before the Senate characterizing the practice of the Supreme Court as "calling balls and strikes?"  That was heard as indicating a humble respect for "the law."  It was overly simplistic and hiding an ambiguity through which we as a nation now are lurching.

It might help to acknowledge that things are changing in Major League Baseball calling balls and strikes.  Experimental technology will help make pitch calls in Cactus and Grapefruit minor league play this year.  Inaccurate calls can be challenged. Similar to other sports there will be a limit to the number of challenges allowed during each contest.  

I am musing about an equivalent being practiced within our courts.  WOW!  Seems to me a long way off if ever to happen.  Instead I'd be happy with some version of humility in SCOTUS similar to one assumes results from an overturned umpire's call and as is approximately present by an appeal process in the rest of our federal courts.  The potential for appeal makes a difference and shapes the way lower court decisions are made.  

The varying appearances of humility from members of SCOTUS is not an isolated occurrence. It is part of that coarsening I spoke of to begin.  Humility is not "the law."  It cannot be legislated or enforced.  It is more in the realm of custom and character and thus relies on wisdom, respect and self-awareness.  None of which are built into video replays. 

As well, humility by itself is not enough. I'm thinking of something like Southern Baptist theologian Carlyle Marney said, "humility is not a virtue unless you have something to be proud of."  He was expanding his claims that denominationalism allows a false pride/humility in the specific orthodoxies.  His favorite target was "good Baptist."

Marney often said that our denominations were "buckets" for manifesting our relationship with God.  But he would continue, "the name for who we are in relationship to God is HUMAN! And the pronoun is US!" 

Roberts' was a false humility because it was hiding a deep partisan interest. In the end, Roberts didn't have anything of which to be proud because his bucket wasn't big enough.

Was it a ball or a strike?  We needn't review the video on Citizens United.  We have to live with that call until a Congress and President change the rules.  Sometimes real humility is better than the video.