Feb. & May 2014 Philadelphia Chapter of Pax Christi U.S.A.

The American Prophetic

Scott Fina has accompanied Dennis Apel from the green line at Vandenburg Airforce Base to arrests, judicial courts and the Supreme Court.

Scott’s reflections are priceless.

“You can raise it, but we don't have to listen to it.”

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia recently barked these words at Erwin Chemerinsky, a renowned legal scholar and attorney representing a defendant. An assertive retort is nothing new for Antonin Scalia. This statement was remarkable, however, because what Mr. Chemerinsky was raising was the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The Supreme Court is the last resort for American citizens seeking redress for violations of their right to free speech.

Justice Scalia made his comment during recent oral arguments in the case, U.S. vs. John Dennis Apel. John Dennis Apel, the defendant, is a Catholic Worker in Guadalupe, California, a small agricultural town straddling coastal Highway 1. Mr. Apel mostly serves impoverished farm laborers and their families, many of whom are undocumented. His Catholic Worker community in Guadalupe operates a free medical clinic, advocates for worker rights, and distributes food and clothing to the very poor.

Mr. Apel is also a peace activist. He regularly protests at Vandenberg Air Force Base, also located on Highway 1, twenty miles south of Guadalupe. Vandenberg is the U.S. test site for intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) which are used to carry nuclear warheads. Military officers responsible for launching nuclear-armed ICBMs are also trained at Vandenberg.

It was Mr. Apel’s protest against nuclear defense systems that landed him in the Supreme Court. For decades protestors have gathered outside the main gate of Vandenberg on the shoulder of Highway 1 in a small spot called the “designated protest area.” The area is marked by a green line on the roadway that limits where protestors can stand, prohibiting their penetration onto base property. Mr. Apel has taken the

lead in organizing quiet monthly vigils behind the green line to protest our nation’s continued maintenance and modernization of nuclear weapons.

Mr. Apel believes nuclear weapons are intrinsically immoral. In that position, he stands in the center of the camp of U.S. bishops who made a compelling argument for nuclear disarmament in their 1983 pastoral letter, The Challenge for Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response. The position on nuclear weapons articulated by the bishops could not have been more assertive:

“No use of nuclear weapons which would violate the principles of discrimination or proportionality may be intended in a strategy of deterrence. The moral demands of Catholic teaching require resolute willingness not to intend or to do moral evil even to save our own lives or the lives of those we love.”

Indeed, the pastoral letter challenges the moral validity of any use of nuclear weaponry, as evinced by its condemning assessment of “limited” nuclear war:

“Our examination of the various arguments on this question makes us highly skeptical about the real meaning of "limited.” ... In our view the first imperative is to prevent any use of nuclear weapons and we hope that leaders will resist the notion that nuclear conflict can be limited, contained or won in any traditional sense.”

Mr. Apel also sees a direct connection between the U.S.’s vast military expenditures, and the persistent poverty among many of its citizens. He again shares that perspective with the U.S. bishops who asserted in their 1983 peace pastoral that: “The arms race is one of the greatest curses on the human race; it is to be condemned as a danger, an act of aggression against the poor, and a folly which does not provide the security it promises.”

And again where they state: “The whole world must summon the moral courage and technical means to say no to nuclear conflict; no to weapons of mass destruction; no to an arms race which robs the poor and vulnerable.…”

The U.S. bishops more pointedly condemned disproportionate spending on national defense in their 1986 pastoral letter, Economic Justice for All, declaring that: “the contrast between expenditures on armaments and on development reflects a shift in priorities from meeting human needs to promoting ‘national security’ and represents a massive distortion of resource allocations.…”

While the bishops made this statement decades ago, it is even more relevant in our time. In fact, they could reissue the entire economic pastoral letter today and add an exclamation point.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) calculated that U.S. spending on defense in 2012 totaled $685 billion, which was 39% of all defense spending in the world that year. Yet, the U.S. accounts for only 4.5 % of the world’s population.

Using data from SIPRI, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation - a nonpartisan organization advancing the fiscal viability of the U.S.

— determined that the U.S. alone spent more money on defense in 2012, than the combined amount of the next ten nations with the highest defense budgets. The Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation has it as the next fifteen nations.

Nuclear weapons systems especially belie the necessity of the U.S.’s exorbitant expenditures on defense. The circumstances under which the U.S. would fire off one of its nuclear-armed warheads are unimaginable for today’s geopolitical realties. The

U.S. no longer faces a military threat from another major power. The continued maintenance and modernization of nuclear weapons are counterproductive for national security since they inhibit international disarmament, and increase the odds of terrorists obtaining and using one.

Nuclear weapons systems are also a waste of U.S. resources that might otherwise be employed to promote the productivity and welfare of its citizens. Consider that the testing of ICBMs — which consumes tens of millions of dollars with every launch — continues while the U.S. reduces spending on SNAP (food stamps), underfunds education, research and development, and defers improvements to its essential infrastructure.

The Peter G. Peterson Foundation challenges the U.S’s massive military spending on grounds of its fiscal unsustainability for our nation. While I abhor the disproportionate, unnecessary, and immoral defense expenditures of the U.S., I’m not convinced that they will lead our nation to economic collapse — the recent fiscal crisis notwithstanding. Similarly, I question whether the gross mal-distribution of income that ever widens the gap between rich and poor in the U.S. - and which the Federal Reserve severely aggravates by inflating the assets of the well healed with the unrealized hope of trickling more resources down to the lower classes - will actually lead to fiscal ruin.

On the contrary, I believe that the perpetual maintenance of a war machine and narrowing of the accumulation of resources at

the top can readily sustain an economy. What they can’t sustain, is a good society. Oligarchies abound and endure in our world, as do police states and suppression of dissent through authoritative force and cooptation of public media. But eventually there is a social tipping point. Streets become places of mass demonstrations and arrests. Instead of green lines, protestors find themselves standing behind makeshift barricades. …

Mr. Apel daily confronts the fallout of such misplaced resources as he attends to the homeless, unemployed, hungry, and sick. The scene he observes outside his door in Guadalupe compels him to drive down Highway 1 and stand in protest on the side of the road outside the main gate of Vandenberg Air Force Base.

On the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Mr. Apel poured a vial of his own blood on the wall and sign in front of the base’s gate. For this act of “vandalism”--which was quickly remedied with soap and water--Mr. Apel received two months in prison. A few years later Mr. Apel took his peaceful protest off Highway 1, a few yards down the entry road leading into the base, where he was arrested and fined for trespass.

For these two symbolic acts, Mr. Apel was officially banned under a federal law from protesting at Vandenberg by the base commander. Mr. Apel ignored that ban repeatedly, and was arrested and removed from the base while peacefully protesting on Highway 1 fifteen times.

Mr. Apel challenged three of his arrests in a federal district court, where he was convicted. He then appealed to the U.S. circuit court, where his convictions were overturned. The U.S. Solicitor General (Obama Administration) and lead attorney for the Pentagon then successfully petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court for a review of the cases, aiming to have Mr. Apel’s convictions reinstated.

The arguments in U.S. vs. John Dennis Apel are complicated. Mr. Apel was arrested while protesting on a public highway. The right for citizens to assemble and express themselves on public streets has long been recognized in the American legal tradition. Highway 1, however, is on military property where it traverses Vandenberg Air Force Bases for several miles, including the spot where Mr. Apel was arrested. The highway is open to the public on the base because the military has granted the State of California a public easement for its use. The easement allows civilians to traverse Highway 1 through Vandenberg unabated, 24-7.

There are two key questions in the case. One is whether the military has violated Mr. Apel’s right to free speech under the First Amendment by arresting him for peaceful protest on a public street. The second is whether the military has authority on that public street—which is located on its property—to remove Mr. Apel from the base, regardless of his right to free speech.

I am associated with the Guadalupe Catholic Worker community, and share in its work. I also join in the community’s protest at Vandenberg. I assisted Mr. Apel in his defense in the federal district court by writing the legal briefs and motions on his behalf. I also assisted him in initiating his appeal in the U.S. circuit court, which then assigned him the pro bono representation of a legal clinic at U.C. Irvine Law School, and its dean, Erwin Chemerinsky.

In the lower court, Mr. Apel and I primarily argued the First Amendment. His case closely aligns to Supreme Court precedent that supports a protestor’s right on military property. But more importantly, as people concerned with the plight of the poor, Mr. Apel and I believe we must work to advance the right to express dissent in our society. We draw that belief from Scripture, where we find, especially in the gospels, public dissent has a sacred dimension.

The gospel narratives mostly depict Jesus of Nazareth as a prophet. While they assign Jesus a miraculous capacity to raise the dead, heal the sick, and feed the hungry, they don’t indicate that those activities were his personal priority - at least not by the measure of what most gospel passages have Jesus doing. On the contrary, most of the text in the gospels describes the itinerant and often very critical preaching of Jesus. This is a puzzling and loaded paradox, especially for those dedicated to serving the poor.

Imagine if you had the power to restore sight to the blind, or to enable the crippled to walk, or pull children back from their deathbeds, or physically multiply volumes of food. As a loving person, how would you spend your time, and where would you place your energies?

There are numerous hermeneutical responses to this contradiction in the four gospels. There is also the position, which has come to dominate Christian thinking, that Jesus’s main purpose was to pay the ransom for human sinfulness that was so extensive it required the sacrifice of his life to earn God’s forgiveness. But as one hesitant to limit God’s mercy, I offer, instead, a practical explanation and underlying intent of the gospel authors.

Jesus was one human being, who lived in a particular place, at a specific point in history. When I read the gospels, he strikes me as a person driven to relay one message to the people of his world: that the causes of human affliction, and their remedies, both lied in them. Jesus insinuates that the manner in which people treat each other and institutionalize that treatment in forming a community and society, can contain their own demise, or path to redemption.

Jesus of Nazareth called the people of his time to build a better world, an alternative “kingdom” to borrow the gospel metaphor. That kingdom would have more humane and equitable arrangements. By being prophetic, Jesus was serving the poor in a most fundamental way. Today we would call this pushing for systemic change.

Through his prophetic activities, Jesus also extended his loving powers to all peoples and all times. But this also got him in trouble and led to his arrest, because it was subversive. To find fault with what is, and to point to something else that should be - is to undermine prevailing authorities and structures. And so, a roaming, nonviolent preacher whose message found a place in the hungry hearts of an oppressed populace became a threat to the Roman-Judaic regime in power in ancient Palestine. That regime acted to silent Jesus and bury his message.

And while I was aghast at the words of Justice Antonin Scalia, I was not surprised he uttered them, or that several other justices supported them in the oral hearing of U.S. vs. John Dennis Apel and suppressed the question of free speech. Here in the case before them, was a single man from the margins of society criticizing a central power structure of government. How could officials in the highest seats of authority not be threatened by such audacity?

The U.S. government had petitioned the Supreme Court for a hearing in the case on the statutory grounds - challenging the circuit court’s interpretation of federal law that restricted the authority of a commander of a military base. Through his legal counsel, Mr. Apel addressed the statutory issue, but most strongly pressed back with the First Amendment.

The Supreme Court has the discretion to weigh either or both arguments in U.S. vs. John Dennis Apel. But indications are that Justice Scalia and a majority of his colleagues will bury the free speech matter, and grant deference to the military authority that pervades American society, including, it would seem, its highest court. Free speech—the American “prophetic”—threatens the arrangements that make so many Americans feel secure. Those arrangements also prevent Americans from becoming the people they are called to be.

How telling that the First Amendment contains freedom of religion and freedom of speech, as if to imply their mutual primacy for democracy. The placement of these rights in the same amendment also suggests that the “prophetic” is their common denominator: a component essential to both the practice of faith and freedom.

Yet, how difficult it has been for Christian Americans to hold the concepts of faith and freedom together. Too often we violate the separation of religion and state by willing specific theological positions on fellow citizens through public institutions. On the other hand, we seem prone to keep public policy apart from our faith, prohibiting “politics” from being preached from our pulpits, and remaining quiet when our societal arrangements disserve universal human values so esteemed in the preaching of Jesus. Those values might otherwise be termed as the “unalienable rights” of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

A clear victim of the mishandling of faith and freedom through neglect of the “prophetic,” is peace. So often, and uncritically, American Christians willingly march off to war, claiming divine blessings and noble sacrifice for “God and country.” But such violent endeavor ultimately serves neither. And how can any discerning Christian imagine Jesus of Nazareth as leading us into battle?

To again cite the U.S. bishops in their pastoral on peace, “The Catholic tradition on war and peace is a long and complex one; it stretches from the Sermon on the Mount to the statements of Pope John Paul II.” That tradition also stretches from Guadalupe to Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, and across our nation to Washington where the pursuit of violence and the prevalence of poverty seem just as connected as they were in the preaching of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount.

Scott Fina

CPF West