GruntGod 2.13.2: Chief Justice Taney Never Served
This is drawn from the revision of the Ralph chapter in the second edition of God Is a Grunt.
Last post I laid out Christopher Parker's "rights-obligation trade-off" — the idea that citizenship in America has always run on an implicit exchange: you serve, the country owes you something back. This post is about the ugliest use anyone ever made of that logic.
In 1857, the Supreme Court decided Dred Scott v. Sandford. Seven justices ruled that Black Americans were not, and could never be, citizens. Chief Justice Roger Taney's opinion leaned on the Militia Act of 1792, which required "every free able-bodied white male citizen" to enroll in the militia. Because the law used the word "white," Taney reasoned, Black Americans had no obligation to defend the country. No obligation meant no sovereignty, no citizenship, no rights the Court was bound to respect. As Parker puts it, Scott's petition for citizenship was denied in part because he had never performed a day of military service.
You know who else never performed a day of military service? Chief Justice Roger Taney. 😬
Something isn’t equal…
I want to sit with that for a second, because it's not just a cheap shot (though it is a little bit of one). It's the whole problem with the rights-obligation trade-off exposed at the root: the people setting the terms of the trade never have to pay into it themselves. Taney got to define whose sacrifice counted as currency and whose didn't, from a position that had never required any sacrifice of him at all.
The reasoning was also, frankly, a strawman. The Militia Act of 1792 was a piece of federal organizational law, setting standards for how state militias would be structured. The word "white" made it into the statute as a concession to slaveholding states, part of the price of colonial unity — not because free Black men in the North weren't serving. They were. Some of them were enrolled in militias in states where the law simply hadn't been enforced against them yet. Taney built a national doctrine denying Black citizenship out of a compromise clause designed to placate the states most invested in denying it. That's not constitutional interpretation. That's laundering an old bigotry through new paperwork.
Washing your hands when you don’t need to is just hand wringing. Ask Pilate.
Here's where I think this connects to something the church needs to hear as much as the country does: gatekeeping who counts as a legitimate sacrifice is one of the oldest moves in the religious playbook, not just the legal one. Cain's offering gets rejected and Abel's gets accepted, and the text never quite tells us why (I write about this at length in the Cain chapter). The priests in Malachi accept blemished, worthless sacrifices from favored parties and reject blameless ones from people they've decided don't count. Whoever holds the authority to define "acceptable sacrifice" holds enormous power, and the history of that power, in both scripture and case law, is a history of people who never had to make the sacrifice themselves deciding whose sacrifice was real.
Dred Scott is an extreme case, but the mechanism isn't rare. It shows up any time an institution — a court, a denomination, a congregation — gets to decide which forms of service "count" toward belonging, usually without ever putting its own skin in that particular game. Ask who's judging the sacrifice, and whether they've ever had to offer one like it. That question does a lot of work.
The Dred Scott decision stood until the Fourteenth Amendment overturned it in 1868. It took a war, hundreds of thousands of Black soldiers enlisting to fight it, and a constitutional amendment to reverse what one Chief Justice, who'd never served a day, decided by himself.
