Citizens can credibly debate whether an activist government advances social justice or denies the same by stultifying incentives and tilting investment priorities. We must embrace as the profoundest of obligations the necessity of ridding the country and the world of our most debilitating weakness, racism, and our most self-destructive behavioral pattern, violence. America needs a new social compact that eschews violence and demands problem solving based on an assumption of individual worth. There is always a tension in a society such as ours that is based on firmly held ethical and religious values but which protects as a fundamental right diversity of perspective. This tension is the genius of our constitutional system.
Process is our most important product.
Reinhold Niebuhr once commented that the temper and the integrity with which the political fight is waged is more important for the health of our society than the outcome of any issue. There are only two things worthy of intolerance. One is intolerance itself, the other is lack of value-based convictions. At the core of human relationships are religious values. History has shown how the individual spirit can be uplifted by religion and its attendant sense of community.