Friends and the Constitution

Three happenings came into confluence recently that remind me of a time long ago, when I was a young graduate student, and experienced the first public Christian leader “breakup” in my career. I can think of five total: one early in my career, two at the midpoint, and two that were more recent.

The events began with the June 24 three-year anniversary of the day the US Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson that overturned the infamous Roe v. Wade decision that had doomed over 60 million preborn babies to an untimely and violent death.

Second, a local church underwent a public spat over the board of elders having released a popular pastor and replacing him with his number two and chosen successor.

And third, in the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in Trump v. CASA (announced on June 27) the Justices put an end to the egregious practice of federal district trial judges overreaching to overturn actions made by the President of the United States. Who can forget a district judge (in Hawaii of all places) shuttering first-term President Donald Trump’s 2017 order to block tourism from seven foreign countries that foster terrorism?

And the overreach continued in the first months of Trump’s second term.

In an appeal to the Supreme Court, Trump asked the Justices to put down lower judicial restrictions of an executive order he had issued restricting so-called birthright citizenship. While the justices did not address citizenship directly, they did so much more.

In CASA, the majority opinion authored by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, said, enough! And with it, Constitutionalists everywhere offered a hearty amen. As Justice Barrett wrote: “Congress has granted federal courts no such power.”

As I read reports of the decision, my mind returned to the year 1986 when I attended a university headed by a man who was giving strong consideration to running for the Republican Nomination for President in 1988, religious broadcaster M. G. “Pat” Robertson. In fact, he did run, coming in third among as many as six GOP candidates, behind the winner, then Vice President George Bush, and Senator Robert Dole, of Kansas.

Back in 1986, Robertson commented in a pre-campaign announcement news interview that decisions made by federal courts, specifically the Supreme Court’s and its 1973 (7-2) decision in Roe, were not the “law of the land.” Robertson said that decisions pertained only to the parties to the particular case in which they ruled. Robertson cited history and a strong reliance on the original intent of the US Constitution. He would have loved the Court’s ruling in CASA.

Pat at the time was chancellor of both a law school and a school of public policy within his Virginia Beach university. And both were headed by a very charismatic dean named Herbert W. Titus. Titus and Robertson, it seemed, could not have been closer personally or more aligned politically.

Titus promptly authored an op ed in The Washington Post defending Robertson, entitled “The Supreme Court Isn’t Supreme—the Constitution Is.” In his piece, Titus wrote that Robertson, in his criticism of widespread court decisions, was only echoing Abraham Lincoln who, when a US Senate candidate, pledged that another 7-2 bad decision by the Court, 1957’s Dred Scott, held no sway over Congress, i.e., it was only a court decision pertaining to that case and not the law of the land. Titus was eloquent in his writing and deep in his knowledge of the history of the Constitution. He adroitly saw that Roe and Dred were both evil decisions by the Court, dehumanizing entire classes of Americans.

Within five years, however, Robertson’s and Titus’s law school faced stringent accreditation requirements from the American Bar Association, a process which Robertson and the university’s board felt was being hampered by Titus’s strident legal views. So, Titus was offered a “promotion to an endowed “chair” position at the law school, but one in which would remove him as the school’s academic dean.

Titus surely suspected that the move was more about ending his leadership than promoting his teaching profile and declined the offer. So, the board soon removed him from his position as dean.

I well recall Pat expressing incredulity at Titus’s opposition to the move, stressing that hardly anyone knew the name of the dean of Harvard’s law school, but anyone with an interest in legal circles was well aware of its two famous professors Lawrence Tribe and Alan Dershowitz. Why would Titus not see such a promotion from dean to a chair position as a good thing, he wondered.

The Robertson-Titus very public breakup rocked the campus. Partisans on both sides had, and likely still have, their opinions as to who was right. But then, as now, the board of directors are in control of any institution and their actions are in fact the authority, no matter how popular or loved a CEO, dean, pastor, etc., might be.

A campus backlash ensued, professors and students alike complained about the loss of their dean who, in my estimation at the time, actually rivaled Robertson in terms of popularity on campus. His chapel messages were very well attended and his law and policy students admired him greatly. The university soon hired a new dean, those students later graduated, and things eventually settled down. Eventually, that is.

The fallout included a lawsuit against the university by Titus and a later one by three of the university’s professors, all Titus loyalists, suing the university over its tenure policy (or lack thereof) in a case that was televised live on Court TV.

I recall watching the proceedings, including both Pat and his wife, Dede, herself a university board member, testifying. The disdain in the eyes of the three professors when Pat, a defendant, but always affable, walked from the witness stand to their plaintiffs table, smiled and extended his hand to shake each of theirs, was palpable.

I was a Robertson partisan but could only feel sad that a lawsuit required God’s people to air their dirty laundry in public. In his letter we know as First Corinthians, the Apostle Paul asked the question, Is it not better to be wronged than for God’s people to go to the secular courts to have disputes resolved? (6:7).

Titus’s suit was settled out of court while the professors lost theirs. At some point thereabouts, eight professors wrote to the American Bar Association complaining about the university. Robertson answered directly with a letter of his own, where he questioned the competence of the professors, in very colorful terms. The letter was posted on a school bulletin board and noticed by a local reporter who was trolling the halls, and who printed it in the local newspaper. If I am not mistaken, another suit ensued against Robertson, for the odd reason that a private letter was printed in the paper without his volition.

Other such breakups I have been involved with ended more amicably—and less litigiously.

Both Robertson and Titus are now in heaven and surely have made their peace as they are now in the holy presence of the Prince of it. But down here, we are still all human, saved but hardly perfect.

I know nothing of the whereabouts of any other participants in the suits by the professors, other than of one of the three professors. We later became acquainted after we both left Virginia and met in another state. This professor told me of how he soon began to feel God’s conviction and went to Robertson to repent and apologize. And to show the broadcaster’s attitude, was even hired back as an instructor at the university.

But regardless of the outcomes my opinion stays the same: The work of the institution, ministry, organization, or church, is more important than any one personality. And those with hurt feelings often act out in ways which they later regret.

Further, public acrimony among the Church of Jesus Christ on earth is an embarrassment. When it happens, both parties suffer in the defeat.

Finally, any party who hopes to bring down the organization because they do not get their own way puts themselves opposite the side of the angels.