What does this post have to do with birds? Nothing. It’s the proverb “what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.” It means equality of treatment in similar circumstances, and may have come to mean that or meant that from its earliest use in the 16th century. Dickens, 1859, is apparently the first one to say it specifically but there are adumbrations of it as early as 1562 (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/what%27s_sauce_for_the_goose_is_sauce_for_the_gander#cite_note-5). But this is not about male/female but black/white. Uh-oh.
The newly minted (2021) Federal holiday, Juneteenth, is this Friday. And like the Fourth of July it is such a sacrosanct holiday it is not moved to a Monday as other other Federal Holidays are. I never heard of this day till arriving in Texas in 1977, and to be frank it was in the context of a racial joke: (“On what day to watermelons become ripe in Texas?”). At the time it made no sense to me. It turns out that June 19th is the day Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation arrived in Galveston, Texas in 1865 in the hands of Union General Gordon Granger. It’s now the official Federal holiday ending slavery. But this post is not about blacks but babies. Black, white, Et al..
Go to this website https://www.history.com/articles/10-historic-presidential-executive-orders. It lists “10 of the Most Consequential Executive Orders and Proclamations”. The two are different, but neither are mentioned in the Constitution but starting with Washington presidents have used both to bypass Congress.
So what does this website consider the most consequential order or proclamation? Yup. The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. What doesn’t even make the list? Ronald Regan’s 1988 presidential proclamation “establishing the sanctity of all human life, including unborn children” (Grant, Grand Illusions, 289).
That says, in part, “Now, therefore, I, Ronald Reagan, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim and declare the unalienable personhood of every American, from the moment of conception until natural death, and I do proclaim, ordain, and declare that I will take care that the Constitution and laws of the United States are faithfully executed for the protection of America’s unborn children. Upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind and the gracious favor of Almighty God. I also proclaim Sunday, January 17, 1988, as National Sanctity of Human Life Day. I call upon the citizens of this blessed land to gather on that day in their homes and places of worship to give thanks for the gift of life they enjoy and to reaffirm their commitment to the dignity of every human being and the sanctity of every human life.” Guess what day this was released to the public? January 15, 1988. What became MLK Day five years before.
Here’s where the goose, the gander, and the sauce come in. In Martin Luther King, Jr.’s much acclaimed August 1963 “I Have A Dream Speech” delivered at the March on Washington, he appealed to the 1863 Proclamation to be fulfilled now 100 years later.
You dare not gainsay the 1863 Proclamation. You dare not ignore it, diss it, or disregard it. A public high school teacher would instantly be removed for doing so. In juxtaposition, I would say that Regan’s pro-life Proclamation is the most ignored and unknown.
What Regan’s proclamation did was specifically include unborn children, as if the founding fathers ever wanted them excluded, under the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution found in the 14th Amendment. Grand Illusions comments, “Despite this, Planned Parenthood has proceeded apace. Apparently a lot has changed since the days when presidential proclamations actually meant something – since the days of Abraham Lincoln” (289).
So, at least take a gander at the inconsistency between goose and gander here. Lincoln’s Proclamation of 1863 for over 60 years, since 1963, has been regarded highly and used to end all manner of real or perceived racial inequality for all people of color. But it took over 30 years for Reagan’s 1988 Proclamation to be acted on and so protect all babies black, white, and all colors in between not from a miserable life of slavery but from death. A lot more was at stake in Regan’s words than Lincoln’s. More than sauce, men, women, or birds. Babies were.
