According to the Pew Research Center, tens of millions of Americans believe that the U.S. Constitution “was inspired by God and reflects God’s vision for America.”

Let’s put aside that American slavery (cruelly different from the Biblical version that resembled indentured servitude) was protected from the outset by the Constitution.

“Originalist” believers in a divine Constitution don’t mind violating Bible laws. They ban the stoning of rebellious sons (allowed: Deut 21:18). They eat pork and shrimp (banned: Deut 14:8-9). They collect debts notwithstanding the Jubilees (Lev 25). They vilify the stranger (notwithstanding Exod 22, Lev 19, Deut 10., &c &c &c).

How can the God-fearing break those laws?

By reinterpreting them. For better or worse.

Language doesn’t have fixed meanings. Society’s needs and morals change. Without reinterpretation, an ancient agrarian culture’s rules become unworkable.

Jewish sages already were interpreting the Bible thousands of years ago. For example, when scholars were troubled that the Bible permits the stoning of a rebellious son, they nullified that law by excluding all girls and women, and boy children, and male adults.

Contrast that narrow reading with the broadening of the prohibition on boiling a baby goat in its mother’s milk (Exod 23, Deut 14). The sages said no to cheeseburgers—although burgers aren’t goat meat, cheese isn’t milk, and burgers aren’t boiled.

The Constitution is not a robot programmed to react in designated ways:  “If this, then that.” Our American sages—chief among them, the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court—inevitably interpret the Constitution’s ambiguities.

Like the Bible, the Constitution deals with gray areas. Both documents are part of a human enterprise within which, in Bernard Malamud’s phrase, a little justice can be found.

Associate Justice Robert Jackson understood this. In his dissent from a 1949 U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning the conviction of a man whose words incited a riot, he wrote, “There is danger that, if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights [which protects free speech] into a suicide pact.”

But lately, in fundamental ways, judges and justices who know better have been turning the Constitution against the American people. They take away rights—to equal treatment, to bodily autonomy, to public safety—like courts from America’s Dark Ages.

These jurists are not “originalists” when it comes to the Bible’s explicit ban on bacon. It’s the fuzzy 1789 Constitution that they see as unchanging.

Jeffrey and I aren’t scholars. He studied constitutional law at The University of Chicago under the late, then-professor, Antonin Scalia—and not much of it stuck. My head is pure polyester and I haven’t studied anything.

But even we see that our Constitution is becoming a suicide pact.

Recent discrimination and prayer cases were decided on lies. Weapons possession was unlinked from well regulated militias. Government amateurs get between doctors and patients. Insurrectionists may hold federal office.

“Originalist” distortions trump truth and common sense.

Thus dies a republic.

By its own hand.

Jeffrey and I try to stop this self-destruction when it comes to asylum law.

On our Rides, we gently remind people that U.S. law promises refuge to decent people who have a well-founded fear of persecution.

We explain that people who ask for refuge at or inside our borders are obeying American law. Those who expel asylum seekers without a fair hearing are the lawbreakers.

We mention that Americans’ revered holy books say to love our neighbors …

… and protect the stranger.

The real world requires us to make hard choices. Our resources have limits.

Yet those limits are much higher than many Americans realize. We can afford to provide for Americans and accept asylum applicants and support our allies abroad.

Overwhelmingly our new neighbors do their part. Immigrants, including unauthorized immigrants, have lower crime and disease rates, and higher labor force participation rates, than those of us born in America. They subsidize Americans, paying taxes for benefits denied to non-citizens.

Jeffrey and I are realists.

We don’t say, Human Rights Only.

We do say, Human Rights First.