After much contemplation I have come to think that to advocate for the legislation of morality is to declare one’s private self the Broker of Human Suffering. Legislating morality doesn’t reduce suffering as much as rearrange suffering in a different profile impacting different people. This past year has been an illustration if not the preview of what happens when one fails to keep courts and legislatures out of the religious or spiritual sphere of human existence and transaction. Some of the Supreme Court decisions have simply relegated the brokering of suffering’s demographics to other secular institutions. And as always, the poor and vulnerable tend to bear the heaviest burden of these machinations. 

In the matter of reproductive rights, there were immediate celebrations of the righteous minds that certain medical procedures could now be declared illegal, immoral and banned. The celebrations were modified when people realized that the medical consequences of their prohibitions would be far reaching and could also fall on their own communities, sons, daughters, born and unborn. It seems the consequences of the decision only shifted the near constant level of human suffering over to the poor, disabled and unaware. Rather than righteous, a movement had inadvertently secured for themselves the Brokers of Human Suffering license outsourcing the private individual’s task of conscience and belief to secular institutions.

History points out time after time it is in the nature of church and state when mixed together corrupt one another. Church and state are destined to exist in a creative tension, each with a critical contribution to make to the negotiation of good while maintaining their distinct identities. Our job is not so much to outlaw what we believe to be Immoral, but rather with humility and grace negotiate to reduce the stubborn high levels of suffering. Our sacred responsibility is to shift governance from the game of victory and defeat to the very hard work of finding a path through the tangled web of human suffering and relieving the first causes. What good is it to anyone to win a handful of ashes?