Our Constitution as Scripture

I had dinner (great beet soup) at a niece’s house last night where we started talking politics and got onto the subject of guns. My niece pulled out a little “black book”, the Constitution, from her purse and read the second amendment. I also have a copy of the Constitution though mine is in the form of a small pamphlet I was handed when I happened to be staying in a hotel, which hosted a North Carolina Tea Party Convention. Following is a transcription of the Second Amendment from it. “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. (But that’s another topic.)

The Constitution in the form of a little black book carried in a purse, along with the edited version of it read in the opening of the new Congress, makes me think of the dominance of “scripture” in religion and ideology. The Bible of the Christians, Koran of the Muslims, Torah of the Jews and the Vedas of the Hindus, are either explicitly or implicitly poetic in their nature and their content complex, multidimensional and open to, what I believe is intentional study and interpretation. (Though I suspect there would be reasonable arguments from each disputing this point.) The meanings expressed in these writings are profound but I think fundamentalists of all brands hold the books in greater esteem than the meaning contained within them.

The fact that my niece had the little black book in her purse is coincidental. She had been just recently looking something up. However, I have a fear that our Constitution, though a great piece of work, I am afraid that the right is starting to attribute it with a sacred status much as “Scriptures” and we will lose the ability and right to interpret and revise its content. You may recall, not too long ago during the horrific “Cultural Revolution” in China, ultraconservative young people were running around waving Mao’s little “Red Book”, quoting passages from it and terrorizing their “intellectual elite” elders.