Flawed Champions

(Photo by Ionut Dragoi at Scopio)

Trailblazers, pathfinders, champions, allies… are inevitably flawed.

Like thousands of other women in several countries, my wife and I are addicted to the show Gentleman Jack on BBC and HBO. It’s about Anne Lister, a woman ahead of her time. She dove into business, the Industrial Revolution and politics (despite being unable to vote herself) at a time when women did not and usually could not do such things. She’s perhaps the most famous of lesbians in British history when the language didn’t yet have a proper word for that. She broke the mold in every way she possibly could. She blazed the trail for British women in the modern era.

Like thousands of other women in several countries, we found the second season uncomfortable. In the first season, Anne Lister was mostly busy wooing the woman she married (in terms of heart, not to be allowed in the eyes of law for a couple more centuries). In the second season, they’re a couple, and after the honeymoon that’s not as sweet as the courtship period. We see more of the rest of Anne’s life. She was part of the landed elite. She had a razor-sharp mind and ambitions as high as Everest. In a world completely dominated by and structured for the benefit of men, she was hard-edged and ruthless. She had to be. Sometimes she took it rather far.

Nobody likes to see the ugliness or mistakes or failings of our champions, but the truth is that even the best of us aren’t ideal. Sometimes the worst of us truly don’t have any redeeming features, but at the other end of the scale there is simply no way to be completely good.

Mormons

This week a weird realization sailed in from the side. People can be simultaneously an adversary and champion. I’m sure I have bumped into that before, but not so that it took my breath away. This week it did.

It happened during the January 6 committee hearings.

The hearings repeatedly take everyone’s breath away, but this is a little sliver of insight that slipped in while I was watching. To make sense of it, you would have to know that I used to be intensely involved in the second American feminist movement. My roles peaked in the early to middle 1980s. Until 1982, we were putting everything we had into trying to get the Equal Rights Amendment ratified. Unlike most amendments, the ERA had a time limit to beat for getting enough states to ratify it. When the deadline arrived, we fell a few states short.

Our biggest opponents tended to be the insurance industry and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS), the Mormons.

By now you probably aren’t surprised that I learned what I could about the Mormons, trying to understand why they were so strongly opposed to equality of rights under the law for women. I got on some conservative mailing lists and went to a few conservative events so I could hear what conservatives say among themselves. I didn’t want my understanding of their point of view distorted by anyone else’s filter. But I didn’t personally know any Mormons, so what I learned about them was mostly from reading.

Once I happened to be on a flight from Denver to Houston beside a Mormon couple who had gotten on the airplane in Salt Lake City. They were likely to be Mormons. I was returning home from an exhausting activist weekend and didn’t feel up to a challenge until after I got some rest, so I kept quiet.

When our meals came, the woman turned to me and asked, conversationally, why I had been in Denver. I hesitated. Then I remarked that since she was drinking a Tab (a caffeinated diet soft drink, and I knew the Mormons frowned on caffeine) either she wasn’t Mormon or she wasn’t strict about it. I had been at a meeting as a national Board member of the National Organization for Women. Colorado was part of my regional responsibility.

As it turned out, she was indeed Mormon. My remark about her soft drink caused her to think that I knew more about her faith than she knew about my cause. We spent the rest of the flight having a friendly conversation, learning more about each other’s beliefs. When we got to Houston, she handed me $20 as a donation to NOW.

My adversaries could be friendly.

Startling Realization

This week I realized the Mormons have delivered much bigger surprises than that.

Senator Mitt Romney is a Mormon and was a bishop of the church before he became a politician. He voted in favor of impeaching the immediate past President, against the Republican party line. At the time I saw that as a matter of honoring his oath as a Senator.

Rusty Bowers, the Speaker of the Arizona House, said in his testimony at the January 6 committee hearings this week that he will vote for DJT again in 2024 if the opportunity arises, despite everything DJT’s people subjected him to, which boggles my mind… but in the onslaught he stood firm. He refused to try to overturn the 2020 election, no matter what anyone did or threatened to do. He said supporting the Constitution is a tenet of his faith.

What?! I missed that when I was learning what made the Mormons tick, but he meant it. Literally.

The church’s founder, Prophet Joseph Smith, wrote:

The Constitution of the United States is a glorious standard; it is founded in the wisdom of God. It is a heavenly banner.

Their Elder L. Tom Perry wrote:

We believe that the Constitution was brought about by God to insure a nation where liberty could abound, where His gospel could flourish. […]

Among other things, the Constitution guarantees the religious freedom that allowed the Reformation to continue and flourish. The great religious reformers began to throw off the rituals and dogmas that had been attached to Christianity during the dark ages and sought to return to the pure and simple truths of the New Testament.

They are still my adversaries in regard to equal rights under the law, but their faith puts us on the same side when it comes to upholding the Constitution of the United States.

Accepting Who We Are

I can shrink that lesson down to the scale of individuals or expand it to the scale of nations, and it holds true. There is no such thing as a perfect champion, a perfect ally. It’s necessary to reject an ally that is flawed beyond what we can tolerate and reasonable for us to try to help each other improve, but demanding perfection is not realistic.

We have flawed champions, and that has to be okay because we are flawed champions ourselves.