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God Bends Over Backwards to Accommodate Humankind…While the Civil Rights Acts and the Americans with Disabilities Act Require [Only] Minimum Effort

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God Bends Over Backwards to Accommodate Humankind…While the Civil Rights Acts and the Americans with Disabilities Act Require [Only] Minimum Effort Journal of Moral Theology, Vol. 6, Special Issue 2 (2017): 10-31 God Bends Over Backwards to Accommodate Humankind…While the Civil Rights Acts and the Americans with Disabilities Act Require [Only] Minimum Effort Mary Jo Iozzio HE CIVIL RIGHTS AND ADA LAWS IN the United States represent some of the results of the interrogations of privilege that attempt to ameliorate the disadvantages of T servitude, marginalization, and the institutionalization of minoritized people with proactive measures for equality and access. However, these laws, like most laws, are limited in their ability to influence a change of heart among many. In this essay I consider some of the contours of these laws, I look at Catholic social teaching for insight on how to be with and for those who are poor and/or otherwise marginalized, and I reflect on what I think God wills we would do. In 2015, the United States celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act (1965) and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990). Some people in the United States and elsewhere celebrated these legislative measures that ensure legal protections against discrimination on the bases of race and/or disability; some did not. One of the concerns on the periphery of this essay is the apparent failure, if not outright hostility, that those not celebrating these legislative successes harbor against people belonging to one or both of these minorities in the United States and elsewhere. Another of my concerns is the failure to recognize that these and other laws require only a minimalist or anemic justice to avoid discriminatory behavior and other harms upon individuals and communities and/or the violation of citizens’ exercise of their rights to common liberties and access to common goods. Mostly, while these laws are critically important for the real lives of those who are vulnerable, I am concerned about the theological implications of following or ignoring God’s lead in accommodating humankind in all its diverse incarnations. Why are these initiatives important? Because not one of us should have to wait for the Kingdom to know that we are loved, lovable, and God Bends Over Backwards 11 capable of loving in return. Not one of us should have to witness another lynching, rape, institutionalization, sterilization, or insult to the humanity of another. Not one of us should ever think ourselves above or untouched by the fray in advantage or disadvantage. Moreover, we Christians may be especially indictable when we have failed to welcome strangers, clothe those naked, feed those hungry, shelter those without safe places to rest, visit those imprisoned—in jails, asylums, hospitals, detention centers, camps, and reservations— or announce the Good News. From most accounts in Christian traditions and to the extent that it can be known, God’s will for what God has wrought is that all creation flourish from the least to the greatest. God’s lead goes far further than these laws in promoting the common goods they seek to distribute, and I find myself wanting to push law to its limits to accommodate people who have been left out of the goods that constitute the relationships with the One and the many. Insofar as God bends over backwards toward humankind and identifying especially with those who are vulnerable in the share of those goods, we Christians must go and do likewise.1 I invoke the image of “bending over backwards” for its sense of no limit in terms of the extra mile, cloak or other cheek that Jesus asks of those who would follow him as well as for its sense of exposure by the one so bending/bent to vulnerability. To the extent that God’s will can be known in God’s becoming human, God has clearly gone the extra mile and experienced exposure even to an excruciating death. Since then, not one other person needs to so bend, except by her or his own choice and where or when injustice prevails. In a time when suspicions about who count as legal members of our communities and who is protected by the laws of the land are raised by isolationist political camps, the image of God bending over backwards suggests another way to be with and to accommodate people in need of both justice and mercy. God’s justice is not punitive; it is reconciliatory. God’s mercy is scandalously generous; it is kenotic and favorably disposed to those who are marginalized on account of their deviance from assumed norms and privilege. I engage this concern about God’s designs for humankind from the perspective of disability studies at the intersections of theological ethics, race and anti-racism activism, and gender minority studies. I am committed to members of minoritized communities, particularly to those designated by hegemonic normativity—subsequent to an unrecognized or unacknowledged complacence by dominant 1 Of course, other religious traditions have similar concerns for the weal of those in their midst who are vulnerable. Clearly, Judaism, the faith of Jesus of Nazareth, presents care for the widow, orphan, and sojourner as imperatives for the people, as important as the laws of the covenant. Islam too has among the pillars of faith support of those who are in need. 12 Mary Jo Iozzio “majoritized” others—as undesirable on the basis of race and disability. These designations about some human beings offend justice at large and, in particular, their dignity as members of the one human community. That offense against the dignity of so many people disturbs the peace and ultimately offends the Creator in whose image each and every person is created and loved. I take the opportunity of these anniversaries to examine the nature of anti-discrimination laws and the protections they afford and to place those initiatives in dialogue with an ethics of virtue, the tools that the law has at its disposal to embrace as a teacher. I remain accountable to those about whom I write—people with disabilities and people of color—as well as to the guild of Catholic ethicists that turns to the implications of the Incarnation above all to find the means and the meanings of God’s justice and mercy in a world distorted by sin. The Civil Rights Acts (1964 and 1965) and the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990) offer protections against discrimination and, to a lesser extent, encourage opportunities for development and the participation of individuals and communities belonging to these protected classes in the local, state, national, and international communities of human commerce. These Acts represent landmark legislation and progress in fostering a sense of “liberty and justice for all” in pursuit of activities that bring people together in economic, educational, commercial, health, housing, legal, political, public, recreational, religious, and social venues. Unfortunately, both people identified with racial minorities and people with disabilities in the United States (and elsewhere) continue to experience limits to their liberty and justice. These limits are saturated by the long lasting residue of bias maintained by unexamined and unearned dominant white, male, hetero, Christian, and ableist privilege that remains preserved (covertly and well) in the systems from which human economies operate.2 While charges are filed in the court systems and claims of multiple types of violation against these protected classes have been argued successfully in US courts,3 the perpetuation of discrimination on the basis of race and disability reveals the limitations inherent to these laws. Those limitations point directly to an anemic conception of law where a more robust appreciation of the laws’ pedagogical function better serves the common weal. 2 Although there are parallels found in the discriminations against women, non- heterosexuals, and religious minorities in the United States, in what follows I confine my argument to the discriminations against and minimums afforded to people of color and people with disabilities. 3 Since Fiscal Year 1997, more than 1.6 million charges have been filed with the EEOC. See “Charge Statistics, FY1997 Through FY 2015,” Enforcement and Litigation Statistics, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, eeoc.gov/eeoc/statistics/enforcement/charges.cfm. God Bends Over Backwards 13 Although the laws of a land serve as a guide in the development of individuals’ and society’s virtue, in forming upright and decent citizens and communities, laws today more often than not represent only a minimum (of decency let alone justice for the moment) owed between parties in human commerce. The notion of the law as a teacher is nearly lost.4 As she builds upon the work of Aristotle and Aquinas, Cathleen Kaveny instructs that the key virtues about which law should teach are autonomy and solidarity.5 Not coincidentally, these virtues are two of the most often referenced in calls for justice by advocacy groups. Yet for those who belong to and/or stand with communities of color and people with disabilities, recognition of their experiences exposes the laws’ inadequacies and demonstrates that more than minimum is necessary, particularly when being black and/or having a disability is the reality questioned. When “being” is questioned, whose lives matter? It is simply “Not OK” to denigrate, discriminate, or disrespect any longer.6 It is all too clear that history has not been kind to people who differ from the dominant populations among which they are present and are presented by their families and/or friends to be acknowledged, recognized, and welcomed. While the United States experiment in democracy through the Constitution and more inclusively in subsequent Amendments purported (and still purports) equal opportunities and freedom for all, not everyone enjoys this equality among their neighbors, except on the papers that define the nation as sovereign and in the cultural imagination set in “The New Colossus” (a.k.a Lady Liberty) and “Manifest Destiny.”7 Sadly and scandalously, the nation’s Original Sin of the theft of this land from and the near extinction of its Native Peoples, coupled with the slave trade and enshrined in its quintessential beliefs and myths about exceptionalism 4 Among others, see Thomas Aquinas, “Treatise on Law,” Summa Theologiae, I-II, q.
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