The Rights Stuff Spurs a New Call to Duty

The Bill of Rights is 200 years old this year. Since those first 10 amendments to the Constitution were drafted, Americans have focused their attention on rights. Individual rights. Human rights. Civil rights. Animal rights. Now some thinkers--William F. Buckley, among them--think it’s time to pay attention to the other side of the constitutional coin: to start pondering responsibilities.

How could the Founding Fathers have forgotten, for instance, to include an article that would read: “Fathers have the responsibility to marry the mothers of their children and to contribute a fair share to their children’s support unless the mothers release them from these obligations.”

Last November, Harper’s Magazine invited a few folks who ponder such matters--Buckley not among them--to gather at Independence Hall in Philadelphia and speculate on whether it’s time to tag a new bill onto the Constitution: a bill of duties. The gist of that conference appears in the February issue.

The five would-be drafters of this hypothetical bill are authors, most with lofty academic positions. But the guy who gets the discussion rolling is Dan Kemmis, mayor of Missoula, Mont.

“Unfortunately,” he says, “we have come to think of democracy as the ongoing answer to a question that might be phrased, ‘What do you want?’ . . . What we have to ask is not what do we want as individuals, but what do we will as a people, what do we will our common world to be?’ ”

One big problem, as Kemmis and others see it, is that a sense of responsibility, or “civic virtue,” is difficult to instill in people when there are 250 million of them spread across a 3,000-mile continent. Only the local level “where the real work of society gets done”--where PTA members commit themselves to building playgrounds, for instance--does “the heat of duty” nudge people to lend a hand to the common good, Kemmis believes.

Then there’s the question of whether coercing a citizenry to adhere to a code of responsibility undermines its sense of civic virtue. As Christopher D. Stone of USC Law Center says: “A citizen’s character is not being nourished when a good civic act is made to be a duty. . . . By definition, duties are antithetical to liberty, because they oblige you to do something whether you want to or not.”

The American Revolution, Stone points out, was a rebellion against duties such as unfair taxation.

But Benjamin Barber, a professor at Rutgers and author of the book “Strong Democracy,” reminds the forum that the battle cry of the American rebels was “Taxation without representation is tyranny.” The colonists understood the link between duties and rights, he says. But that link has eroded to the extent that today’s slogan might be, “Representation Without Taxation!”

The panel seems dubious about the advisability of a bill of duties. But Harper’s editor and forum moderator, Gerald Marzorati, pushes the group to conjure up such a document.

The resulting discussion, about a duty to family, a duty to country and a duty to place, reflects the complexity and inherent contradictions that will dog attempts to define civic duty in the future. Christopher Lasch, author of “The Culture of Narcissism,” and “The True and Only Heaven” was perhaps the most specific in his proposed wording. Besides requiring that fathers marry the mothers of their children, he also drafted this article:

“Marriage should be undertaken only by those who view it as a lifelong commitment and are prepared to accept the consequences, foreseeable and unforeseeable, of such a commitment. No state shall pass laws authorizing divorce for any but the weightiest reasons. In the case of couples with children under the age of 21, divorce is hereby forbidden.”

Mary Ann Glendon of Harvard Law School had two slightly less controversial articles on the same subject.

Article 1: “The nation has a special responsibility for the protection and welfare of children and their families.”

Article 2: “The nurture and education of children are duties primarily incumbent on the parents.”

Clearly, tension between rights and duties seemed apt to pull the two-sided coin apart.

Still, none of the participants disagreed with Barber’s proposed official aphorism for the constitutional preamble: “Liberty isn’t free; it’s paid for in the currency of obligation.”

REQUIRED READING

Parents who have been through the child-care wringer may not believe this, but two Southern California cities just made Working Mother’s annual “15 Best Cities for Child Care” list. Of course Irvine, which recently funded a $1.2-million child-care facility in the Civic Center made the list. But who would have thought Los Angeles would be up there? The magazine cites Tom Bradley’s efforts to wipe out the latchkey kid syndrome and specifically praises the city for its “lifesaving” after school program--which provides free, supervised after-school care at every public elementary school in the city.

The first rappers to manifest the Five Percent Doctrine may have been the Supreme Team. Now everyone from Brand Nubian to the Earth Angels and Poor Righteous Teachers are elevating on the mathematics.

If your response to this is “huh?” you might want to read Charlie Ahern’s story “The Five Percent Solution,” in the February Spin. The piece traces a Muslim sect called The Five Percent Nation back to its roots, and discusses the current infatuation among popular rap groups with this supremacist doctrine, which purportedly preaches that “the black man is God, and the white man is the Devil.”

NEWS ON NEWSSTANDS

For some time now, the buzz has been that the upstart, upscale Los Angeles-oriented magazine Buzz was in trouble. Last Friday, the magazine faxed its advertisers a letter saying that the next issue won’t happen. The magazine was reportedly doing well on the newsstands and was pulling in advertisers, too. It just didn’t have a sufficiently large nest egg to pull it through these troubled economic times.

CEO Eden Collinsworth and publisher Susan Gates both remain chipper. They swear they’re going to round up a second wave of financing and get back in circulation soon. But folks who watch the magazine scene wonder whether Buzz isn’t the latest victim of the same economic plague that recently killed Egg, Wigwag, Exposure and other titles. Let’s hope this attempt at corporate cryonics works, and that Buzz, a welcome addition to the local ‘zine scene, is revived as soon as the economy thaws.

ESOTERICA

Spinal Network EXTRA is a slick, well-produced quarterly featuring a wide array of articles of interest mainly to people with spinal injuries. The Winter 1991 issue, for example, contains a hard-edged package of articles on substance abuse, as well as pieces on mono-skiing, kayaking, a wheelchair-bound body builder and touring New York City in a wheelchair. (Spinal Network EXTRA, P.O. Box 4162, Boulder, Colo. 80306. $15 a year.)