Azaleas, March Madness and Judge Wilkinson
If you’ve never been to Savannah, GA in mid-March, put it on your bucket list. Today was one of those lovely, mid-70s days, where the azaleas are blooming and the town is booming with the buzz of St. Patrick’s Day upcoming - that inexplicable touch of infinity. And, I love March Madness. Is there really any better time of the year? Where else can you see Valpo can knock off a number 4 seed with 2.5 seconds remaining in a mad full court dash for 2, or the wonderfully named Shaka Smart lead VCU to victory over Kansas?
But, away from the mid-March reverie. Yesterday, Fourth Circuit Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, wrote an Op Ed piece in the NYT, entitled – Cry, the Beloved Constitution (a play on the beautifully written Cry the Beloved Country about apartheid South Africa). Some question whether Judge Wilkinson should have written in reference to the current national debate about the Affordable Care Act. But, Judge Wilkinson’s piece is far more than that. He writes eloquently, in my view, about the debates tearing at our country – from the left and right, but concludes that he would not lose faith given,
where democracy has brought this country. . . All factions owe their fellow citizens the hope and the prospect of democratic change, not the message that their views have been constitutionally condemned and their opponents’ views carved in the stone of our founding charter. Restraint has much to commend it as a judicial value, not least of which is that it extends the hand of tolerance and respect to those whose views we may not share, but whose citizenship we do share and whose love of family, community and country burns no less brightly than our own.
