Muusja Mailing List: Sermon and reading text

[Lauren Culbert (lculbert]

Editor's note: There have been requests for a copy of Kendyl Gibbons' sermon
that got FUS members fired up to act on the recent Habeus Corpus bill in
Congress. Here it is, including readings.
****

October 8, 2006                       The Judgment of History

Rev. Kendyl Gibbons, Senior Minister, First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis


Dearly beloved, what is the matter with us?

I should have done this last week, I know; why didn't I?  I was stunned
speechless; perhaps you were too.  Perhaps we still are.  It has long been
my fear that if I were ever in imminent danger of rape, I would want to
scream, but be too terrified to catch my breath to be able to do it.  I feel
like that now.  How can I catch my breath to scream?  Why aren't we all
screaming?

Do you understand what happened last Friday?  The congress of the United
States, your representatives and mine, passed a bill; they do that all the
time.  But this one was different.  This one rips from beneath our feet the
most elemental liberties that citizens of civilized western nations have
trusted for the past eight centuries.

The modern institution of civil and human rights began in June of 1215 when
King John  of England was forced by a group of feudal lords to sign the
Magna Carta in a meadow at Runnymede.  Two of the most critical parts of the
Magna Carta were articles 38 and 39, which established the foundation for
what is now known as "habeas corpus" law (literally, "produce the body" from
the Latin - meaning, broadly, "let this person go free or else give him a
trial - you may not hold him forever without charging him with a crime"). 
The concept of habeas corpus in the Magna Carta led directly to the Fourth
through Eighth Amendments of our own Constitution, and hundreds of other
federal and state due process provisions.

Articles 38 and 39 of the Magna Carta state:

"38 In future no official shall place a man on trial upon his own
unsupported statement, without producing credible witnesses to the truth of
it.

"39 No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or
possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other
way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so,
except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land."

This was radical stuff at the time, and over the next four centuries average
people increasingly wanted for themselves these same protections from the
abuse of governmental power that the feudal lords had gotten at Runnymede.
But for another 400 years, from 1215 to 1628, outside of the privileges
enjoyed by the feudal lords, the average person could still be arrested and
imprisoned at the whim of the king, with no recourse to the courts.

Then, in 1627, King Charles I overstepped, and the people snapped. Charles I
threw into jail five knights in a tax disagreement, and the knights sued the
King, asserting their habeas corpus right to be free or on bail unless
convicted of a crime.  King Charles I, in response, invoked his right to
simply imprison anybody he wanted (other than the rich feudal lords),
anytime he wanted, as he said, "per speciale Mandatum Domini Regis."

This is essentially the same argument that George W. Bush makes today for
why he has the right to detain people without charges for as much as their
entire lives solely on his own say-so: 
because he's in charge. And it's an argument now affirmed by our
representatives in congress, who have chosen to dispense with America's
founding principles.[1]  Why?  Apparently, out of professional political
expediency.

Pat Leahy, senior senator from Vermont, and an outspoken opponent of the
bill passed last week, explained, "In my own caucus, people say, 'We can't
oppose this, look what happened to Max Cleland.'" (A Vietnam veteran
confined to a wheelchair because of war wounds, Cleland, a Georgia senator,
was defeated by GOP attacks ads in 2002 because he had supported a
Democratic filibuster delaying the establishment of the Department of
Homeland Security). Leahy recounted that his Democratic colleagues also
argue, "'We have to go along with it because we'll never be able to explain
it back home.'" To which the senator responded, "Maybe one way to explain it
is to say, 'I stood up for you and your rights.'" [2]

Why aren't we screaming?

In the days of ancient Israel, the prophet messengers of Yahweh arose at
such moments as this, to denounce the misappropriation of god's authority,
and the miscarriage of god's justice.  They were not concerned with magical
divinations of the future, but rather with the simple logic of what must
inevitably follow when the rulers of nations betrayed the trust and
well-being of their people.  The prophet Isaiah once made such a
denunciation and prediction against the kings of Assyria and Babylon:

Woe to those who enact unjust statutes and who write oppressive decrees,
Depriving the needy of judgment and robbing my people's poor of their
rights, Making widows their plunder, and orphans their prey! What will you
do on the day of punishment, when ruin comes from afar? To whom will you
flee for help? When I Yahweh have brought to an end all my work on Mount
Zion and in Jerusalem, I will punish the utterance of the king of Assyria's
proud heart, and the boastfulness of his haughty eyes. For he says: "By my
own power I have done it, and by my wisdom, for I am shrewd. I have moved
the boundaries of peoples, their treasures I have pillaged, and, like a
giant, I have put down the enthroned. My hand has seized like a nest the
riches of nations; As one takes eggs left alone, so I took in all the earth;
No one fluttered a wing, or opened a mouth, or chirped!"

And he has said in his heart: "I will scale the heavens; I will ascend above
the tops of the clouds; I will be like the Most High!" Yet down to the
nether world you go, to the recesses of the pit!
When they see you they will stare, pondering over you: "Is this the man who
made the earth tremble, and kingdoms quake? Who made the world a desert,
razed its cities, and gave his captives no release?
All the kings of the nations lie in glory, each in his own tomb; But you are
cast forth without burial, loathsome and corrupt, For you have ruined your
land, you have slain your people! Let him not be named forever, that scion
of an evil race! I will rise up against them, says Yahweh of hosts, and cut
off from Babylon name and remnant, progeny and offspring. Then his yoke
shall be removed from my people, and his burden from their shoulder.
This is the plan proposed for the whole earth, and this the hand
outstretched over all nations. [3]

In fact, they were sometimes wrong, those prophets of long ago.  They were
sometimes factually wrong about what would happen in the pages of history,
and they were even sometimes morally wrong about what might constitute real
holiness.  But they were right about this:  that what we are called upon to
do when rulers abuse their powers is to cry aloud in the name of all that is
holy, and to pronounce doom upon tyranny in every form.  This morning I
stand here in the footsteps of Micah, Amos, and Isaiah, to call out to you
that our national covenant has been violated at its core, and to proclaim
that retribution must and will come.

We have said it ourselves; fifty years ago, in a courtroom in Nuremberg,
Justice Robert Jackson, American counsel for the prosecution of the German
high command war criminals, said it on our behalf, when he described by what
right the victorious Allied nations had created that unprecedented trial.
In the opening moments of our national life, Alexander Hamilton - arguably
the most conservative of the Founders - wrote this in The Federalist
Papers:

"The establishment of the writ of habeas corpus ... is perhaps a greater
security to liberty than any the Constitution contains. ...The practice of
arbitrary imprisonments have been, in all ages, the favorite and most
formidable instruments of tyranny. ...
To bereave a man of life, or by violence to confiscate his estate, without
accusation or trial, would be so gross and notorious an act of despotism, as
must at once convey the alarm of tyranny throughout the whole nation; but
confinement of the person, by secretly hurrying him to jail, where his
sufferings are unknown or forgotten, is a less public, a less striking, and
therefore a more dangerous engine of arbitrary government." [4]

There can be no escape by ignorance; George Bush knows exactly what he is
doing; he is as brazen about it as any would-be tyrant ever was.  Those
representatives who have surrendered our freedom to him are educated men and
women; they knew what they did.  And we who sit here today, perplexed and
alarmed - we know what is at stake; we know the example that we owe the
world, we know what history looks like when bullies gather power into their
hands unchecked.  And we know the judgment of humanity against the violence
and arrogance of those who without shame start wars, torture their
opponents, and shield one another behind the 
fiction of legal process.   Within the lifetime 
of people in this room today, we were part of it, upholding honor and the
laws of human decency.  I say that we shall find ourselves arraigned before
the same bar of moral judgment at which we once meted out humanity's justice
to the fallen despots and brutalizers of the Third Riech, no very long time
from now.  And I don't care how deeply they bury themselves in the mud of
national legislation perverted by a spineless congress; the court of world
opinion will know how to proceed against our current national leaders, and
ourselves.  Following orders is not a sufficient defense; we knew it 50
years ago; others will know it for us hereafter.

In the fraught days of the American revolution, the patriot leader Samuel
Adams said to his fellow citizens,

If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better
than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not
your counsels or your arms. 
Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. 
May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were
our countrymen. [5]

No doubt posterity will forget your name and mine, as it has forgotten those
of the ordinary German citizens who awoke one morning to find their capitol
in ashes and their constitutional rights vanished with the stroke of a pen.
It will deal less mercifully with the authors of this outrage; soon or late,
they will find themselves held accountable by the citizens of a world less
addicted to privilege and passivity 
than we are.   There is no Old Testament god 
bestowing any celestial prerogative on George Bush's will to tyranny, once
named the divine right of kings; by the same token, there is no supernatural
author of justice to condemn and eventually punish his hubris.  Yet I will
stand here today in the mantle of prophecy, to announce that the testimony
against him is given; to speak on behalf of human liberty a judgment which
will surely come.

Half a century ago, Robert Jackson pointed out that in bringing those
twenty-some broken old men who were the remnants of Nazi leadership to
trial, the world was according to them the very structures of justice that
their government had ruthlessly stripped away from its victims:
They took from the German people all those dignities and freedoms that we
hold natural and inalienable rights in every human being.  .the law
includes, and if it is to serve a useful purpose it must condemn, aggression
by any other nations, including those which sit here now in judgment. We are
able to do away with domestic tyranny and violence and aggression by those
in power against the rights of their own people only when we make all men
answerable to the law. This trial represents mankind's desperate effort to
apply the discipline of the law to statesmen who have used their powers of
state to attack the foundations of the world's peace and to commit
aggressions against the rights of their 
neighbors.   The real complaining party at your 
bar is Civilization. In all countries it is still a struggling and imperfect
thing.  [6]

Struggling and imperfect it may be, yet civilization itself will rise again
and again, in the face of all oppression and degradation, to summon human
consciousness again and again to what we know we can be, to the world we
know we can build, in liberty, justice, and peace.  No legal fictions that
this president can propose, or this congress can pass, will shield them from
that ultimate accountability, which I hope with all my heart to see
accomplished in my own lifetime, and which I summon from every source that
might have power to effect it.  And on that day, you and I may be glad for
our oblivion, unless we shall stand in the world's memory among those who
did our utmost to stop the spread of this darkness.

Friends, I wish I knew the answer.  I wish I thought that the upcoming
elections had the potential to turn this around; maybe they do, but I'm not
sanguine.  Like the prophets of olden days, I have no quick fix; we must and
will suffer the consequences of what we have allowed our leaders to do.  I
can only suggest, as they would have, that what will save us in the end is
faithfulness to the values of the covenant that we and our ancestors have
long professed; in our case, to the moral laws of human decency, and to what
was once the constitution of this nation.  There's only one other thing that
I know about the answer to this mess - silence isn't it.




[1] Republicans Give In To Bush, Betray America" 
by Thom Hartmann  at CommonDreams.org   September 25, 2006
[2] "Tortured justice"  by Mark Benjamin and Walter Shapiro at Salon.com

[3] Isaiah, Chapters 10 and 14   New American Bible

[4] "Republicans Give In To Bush, Betray America" 
by Thom Hartmann  at CommonDreams.org
                 September 25, 2006
[5]  speech at the Philadelphia State House, August 1, 1776.

[6] "Second Day, Wednesday, 11/21/1945, Part 04", in Trial of the Major War
Criminals
             before the International Military Tribunal,  Nuremberg





"Second Day, Wednesday, 11/21/1945, Part 04",
in Trial of the Major War Criminals before the 
International Military Tribunal.
Nuremberg

JUSTICE ROBERT JACKSON: May it please Your Honors:
The privilege of opening the first trial in 
history for crimes against the peace of the world 
imposes a grave responsibility. The wrongs which 
we seek to condemn and punish have been so 
calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, 
that civilization cannot tolerate their being 
ignored, because it cannot survive their being 
repeated. That four great nations, flushed with 
victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of 
vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive 
enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the 
most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.

This Tribunal represents the practical effort of 
four of the most mighty of nations, with the 
support of 17 more, to utilize international law 
to meet the greatest menace of our times -- 
aggressive war. The common sense of mankind 
demands that law shall not stop with the 
punishment of petty crimes by little people. It 
must also reach men who possess themselves of 
great power and make deliberate and concerted use 
of it to set in motion evils which leave no home in the world untouched.

In the prisoners' dock sit twenty-odd broken men. 
Reproached by the humiliation of those they have 
led almost as bitterly as by the desolation of 
those they have attacked, their personal capacity 
for evil is forever past. It is hard now to 
perceive in these men as captives the power by 
which as Nazi leaders they once dominated much of 
the world and terrified most of it. Merely as 
individuals their fate is of little consequence to the world.

What makes this inquest significant is that these 
prisoners represent sinister influences that will 
lurk in the world long after their bodies have 
returned to dust. We will show them to be living 
symbols of racial hatreds, of terrorism and 
violence, and of the arrogance and cruelty of 
power. They are symbols of fierce nationalisms 
and of militarism, of intrigue and war- making 
which have embroiled Europe generation after 
generation, crushing its manhood, destroying its 
homes, and impoverishing its life.

  They took from the German people all those 
dignities and freedoms that we hold natural and 
inalienable rights in every human being. The 
people were compensated by inflaming and 
gratifying hatreds towards those who were marked 
as "scapegoats". Against their opponents, 
including Jews, Catholics, and free labor, the 
Nazis directed such a campaign of arrogance, 
brutality, and annihilation as the world has not 
witnessed since the pre-Christian ages. They led 
their people on a mad gamble for domination. They 
diverted social energies and resources to the 
creation of what they thought to be an invincible 
war machine.  They overran their neighbors. To 
sustain the "master race" in its war-making, they 
enslaved millions of human beings and brought 
them into Germany, where these hapless creatures 
now wander as "displaced persons". At length 
bestiality and bad faith reached such excess that 
they aroused the sleeping strength of imperiled 
Civilization. Its united efforts have ground the 
German war machine to fragments. But the struggle 
has left Europe a liberated yet prostrate land 
where a demoralized society struggles to survive. 
These are the fruits of the sinister forces that 
sit with these defendants in the prisoners' dock.

Unfortunately the nature of these crimes is such 
that both prosecution and judgment must be by 
victor nations over vanquished foes. The 
worldwide scope of the aggressions carried out by 
these men has left but few real neutrals. Either 
the victors must judge the vanquished or we must 
leave the defeated to judge themselves.  The 
former high station of these defendants, and the 
notoriety of their acts, make it hard to 
distinguish between the demand for a just and 
measured retribution, and the unthinking cry for 
vengeance which arises from the anguish of war. 
It is our task, so far as humanly possible, to 
draw the line between the two. We must never 
forget that the record on which we judge these 
defendants today is the record on which history 
will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants 
a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips 
as well. We must summon such detachment and 
intellectual integrity to our task that this 
trial will commend itself to posterity as 
fulfilling humanity's aspirations to do justice.

The ultimate step in avoiding periodic wars, 
which are inevitable in a system of international 
lawlessness, is to make statesmen responsible to 
law. And let me make clear that while this law is 
first applied against German aggressors, the law 
includes, and if it is to serve a useful purpose 
it must condemn, aggression by any other nations, 
including those which sit here now in judgment. 
We are able to do away with domestic tyranny and 
violence and aggression by those in power against 
the rights of their own people only when we make 
all men answerable to the law. This trial 
represents mankind's desperate effort to apply 
the discipline of the law to statesmen who have 
used their powers of state to attack the 
foundations of the world's peace and to commit 
aggressions against the rights of their neighbors.

The real complaining party at your bar is 
Civilization. In all countries it is still a 
struggling and imperfect thing.  But it points to 
the dreadful sequence of aggressions and crimes I 
have recited, it points to the weariness of 
flesh, the exhaustion of resources and the 
destruction of all that was beautiful or useful 
in so much of the world, and to greater 
potentialities for destruction in the days to 
come. It is not necessary among the ruins of this 
ancient and beautiful city with untold members of 
its civilian habitants still buried in its 
rubble, to argue the proposition that to start or 
wage an aggressive war has the moral qualities of 
the worst of crimes. The refuge of the defendants 
can be only their hope that international law 
will lag so far behind the moral sense of mankind 
that conduct which is crime in the moral sense 
must be regarded as innocent in law.

Civilization asks whether law is so laggard as to 
be utterly helpless to deal with crimes of this 
magnitude by criminals of this order of 
importance. It does not expect that you can make 
war impossible. It does expect that your 
juridical action will put the forces of 
international law, its precepts, its prohibitions 
and, most of all, its sanctions, on the side of 
peace, so that men and women of good will, in all 
countries, may have "leave to live by no man's leave, underneath the
law."