“When you were in law school, did they teach you that impartiality was achievable?”
“Well, I wasn’t in the top of my class,” I said of my pre-pastoral life. “So I may have missed something, but no.” Then I switched into theological gear: “Impartiality would be more like an eschatological hope.”
This was no idle chatter that we made while walking our dogs. We had just been watching the Sotomayor confirmation hearings, on a day in which some senators suggested pure impartiality was possible. It reminded me of a time when I walked into a courtroom to try a divorce case to find a note left by a previous lawyer on the judges who would be deciding the case: “Richards favors the wife; Hunt favors the husband.” Everyone knew the judges’ personal stories--Richards didn’t believe women should work; Hunt got taken to the cleaners in his own divorce. We knew what we had to work with.
What scares me are judges whose biases are hidden, especially from the very people who hold them. That is, those who are not aware of the prejudices formed by their experiences, who are blind to the distortions of their own insularity and who uphold in the law only that which confirms their rock solid world view (For example, take a look at Jeffrey Toobin’s article here). Pure impartiality is a fallacy, but judges should be able to claim their own baggage when they get to the bench and then try not to dress other people in the outfits they brought along.
Sotomayor’s confirmation could help us as a people seriously consider the relationships between empathy and impartiality. But I don’t think it will. Those are not really the questions being asked. They are questions being used to convince a certain political base that the one political party can be trusted to mount the charge against…well, against whatever threatens.
Now comes word of a controversy in the Mississippi Conference of the United Methodist Church that also invokes the relationship between empathy and impartiality. During Friday night worship, members of three congregations gave testimony: a teenager who had lived in a Methodist Children’s home; a married couple (an African-American man and a white woman); and a lesbian couple. This was not cooked up by some PR firm. These were real people, offering beautiful testimony. And appropriately enough when testimony is offered at a revival meeting, lots of Mississippi Methodists got convicted.
The mad people, from what I gather, argue that the bishop should be punished because she allowed the lesbian couple to stand and speak—an implicit endorsement of homosexuality. Plus, they say, when word gets out to the laity, they won’t give money for the mission and work of the denomination.
The mad people in Mississippi make me mad. I want to poke my finger in their faces and ask them what happened to empathy. The testimonies were about love, not some agenda.
But I can’t do that. I am not a cable TV blowhard, but a Christian, and a Methodist to boot. I have to read the Mississippi bishop’s pastoral letter, where she refers to the parable of the wheat and the tares. At least according to Jesus, we don’t get to pull up those tares (ie. the mad Mississippians). We have to tolerate them—at least until they are deservedly thrown into the fire. Further, I have to wonder whether I’ve got some weeds growing in my own tree-hugging soul (what was that about fire again?). We practice a faith that pushes against our own undue self-regard, as God blesses each of our stories, roots all tangled up together, and redeems them for the healing of the world.
This is no plea for sunshine, lollipops and rainbows, but rather for the kind of fierce, hard-scrubbed self-knowledge that some see in Justice Sotomayor, and that does, in fact, make room for greater impartiality and finally, with grace, for light and life and love.
Melissa Wiginton is Vice President for Ministry Programs and Planning at the Fund for Theological Education.
