In Defense of the Constitwotion

I'm tired. I spent last week with my students at camp, came home Saturday to some housework that needed to be done, and was the resident staff member at church on Sunday - which meant I preached Sunday morning and was on duty Sunday night. So forgive me if this comes off less eloquent than I hope.

I think it's time we established that our country is no longer serviced by having only one Constitution. As things seem to swing ever farther to the extremes on both sides of the political spectrum, it would appear reasonable to do away with one central document whose carefully crafted language no longer meets our modern day sensibilities, and instead draft two new documents aimed towards the two dominant ideologies currently in power.

I propose we call them the Constitwotion. One for Red State folks. One for Blue State folks.

You can surmise the basic premises for each - Red State rules would be heavy on specific social behaviors deemed "harmful" and on lack of regulatory control for businesses. It wouldn't quite be the old call of small government, but it would hew more towards the modern conservative ideal.

Blue State rules would lean towards a more egalitarian model where everyone contributes his or her fair share and everyone gets the exact same treatment. Everyone. Even the ivory tower types who typically get treated better than everyone else but who push for equality even as they surf the free WiFi at Starbucks on their iPads.

It shouldn't take too long to draft these documents - chances are each party already has something similar in writing as part of the full-contact presidential campaign preparations. Now, instead of having to choose one vision of America or the other for ALL people, we can simply choose to live under one or the other as separate people. When you head into the primaries and you select the party for which you intend to vote, you'll simultaneously be aligning yourself with the Constitwotion under which you want to live.

Clean. Simple. Neat.

Sure, there'll be problems - for instance, most of the rich people who like tax breaks and the ability to shelter their income would be hard pressed to sign up for a Blue State Constitwotion that would tax their wealth and redistribute it to fair market systems, which would severely compromise the Blue State system of government (you gotta generate revenue or cut costs somewhere).

And those people who would happily choose to live under the Red State system might find it a little chafing to have their personal liberties closely monitored and "fine tuned" by the prevailing moral crisis of the moment.

But since we obviously can't work together under one document for all, we need to embrace our destiny and get to work on these two separate but equal documents. Sure, it's like the Civil War without guns, but hey - if you took away the messing fighting and dying and the whole inhumanity of slavery - the idea of two separate nations with two separate ideologies doesn't sound too bad, does it?

It must not, because that seems to be what we're pushing towards anyway.

Just a thought.