I can’t write about sports today.
Or even speak of our climate crisis despite murderous heatwaves, fierce wildfires, and early ferocious hurricanes reminding us of how our energy choices imperil life on Earth.
I can, and will, write about democracy. Ours, to be precise.
I begin by juxtaposing our July 4th celebrations of our nation’s aspirational founding with the deepening sense of unease that I, and millions of others, are feeling about our nation’s future direction.
Historians tell us of treacherous, teetering times that our Republic has withstood to reassure us that we’ll get through our fraught time too. We’re inspired by hearing the stories of Americans rising to meet the dire moment and surmount our periodic crises to rejoin our centuries-long struggle to fulfill our nation’s radical promise of freedom and equality.
Sadly, I’m not sure such comforting stories are breaking through right now. Or if they are entirely relevant to the peril of the prospect of autocratic rule we confront today.
In his Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln reasserted the founders’ foundational proposition: “our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” before sagely observing that the Civil War was “testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
At Gettysburg, nearly all of the young soldiers of First Minnesota Infantry Regiment fell with wounds, many fatal, in their charge against Confederate forces on Cemetery Ridge. On no other American ground did as many of our countrymen die as they did at Gettysburg. On that July 4th, after days of killing, the rain arrived and “washed blood from the grass,” as the armies tended to their dead and wounded.
One-hundred and sixty-one years later, Americans still are struggling to build the “more perfect union,” which our Constitution’s writers called on us to do, confronting the stubborn inequality of opportunity, access and treatment so many of our citizens experience daily.
In this quest, we’ve stumbled, only to right ourselves and strive anew. At our best, our nation is the envy of the world. Yet, envy recedes as widening fissures rip us apart.
We wonder if our House divided will fall.
Core freedoms that generations of Americans sacrificed their lives to protect – and countless others fought nonviolently on our soil to guarantee – are being taken away by courts riven by ideology and legislatures cowed by powerful forces funded by greed.
None of this is happening in the dark. It’s taking place in plain view - visible to all in the words of Project 2025 and voiced by a man with dictatorial desires and delusional intent. Read. Listen, and you shall hear his plans to obliterate American’s legal rights - except for corporations and those who run them– and the protections guaranteed all Americans by our Constitution as a bulwark of our freedoms.
In this envisioned nation, the courts and the president will govern us.
Norman Rockwell’s “Freedom of Speech” (1943), one in a series of paintings of what Franklin D. Roosevelt called our four freedoms.
"We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” Kevin Roberts, of the Heritage Foundation, the progenitor of Project 2025, which maps out this planned revolution.
It is imperative that we take this man and his enablers at their word.
However, the veil of this man’s incessant lies seems to have numbed Americans to the point that they are no longer able to be repulsed by his dangerous threats even as they are startled by their President’s lapses.
To escape this threatening time with our freedoms intact, we must respond to both situations, not focus, as we are, on one - President Biden’s decision, while the other man advances his destructive ways.
In pitting the gravity of our post-debate moment against the absurdist spectacle of last Thursday night, Susan Glasser, writing in The New Yorker, observed this: “Is this how democracy dies, in a shouting match between two seniors about their golf game?”
On July 5, 1776, precious words - worthy of the sacrifice of generations to follow - overthrew the monarch, lifting the yoke of autocracy from the American people’s shoulders. It was a bold, courageous act by those who signed our Declaration of Independence, risking their lives, and those of all Americans, as they thrust the confederation of states into an unknown future.
Were their words perfect, no. But they gave us, as free people, the rights we needed to create a just society governed by people pledging to support the Constitution.
On this July 5, we live in similarly perilous times with an unknown future. In the fall, we will vote in arguably our most critical presidential election, equal perhaps to 1860, in which the American people delivered to our nation the president we needed.
As President Biden ponders what is best for our nation, as I know he is doing, we, its people, must ready ourselves to act as our courageous founders did — with courage and resolve, persistence and patriotism. With us resides salvation of the democracy passed down to us by generations, each of whom was tested and rose to meet the moment.
Our democracy has been the envy of the world, and I am confident it will be again, as we rise together, as much as we are able, to meet this inescapable moment that we’ve been given.
Our National Archives
I downloaded the original image of the U.S. Constitution from the National Archives, wanting the founders’ original document to inspire us today. With this deference to history, I share in this writing a single mention of my fight for gender equality and the court’s rendering of its judgment based on the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, added to our Constitution in the wake of the Civil War.
In the National Archives series on the Bill of Rights, its educators highlight Ludtke v. Kuhn in Freedom to Cover the World Series. The federal court’s original complaint is preserved in the Archives.
“Baseball and social change have been linked since Jackie Robinson broke the color line in 1947. Thirty years later, Sports Illustrated reporter Melissa Ludtke broke another line when she sued Commissioner of Baseball Bowie Kuhn to gain access to the locker room. This ‘gender line’ in the reporting of sports calls out 1st amendment-guaranteed freedom of the press and the 14th amendment’s equal protection clause.”
In March 2025, as part of Women’s History Month, the National Archives has invited me to speak about my court case and Locker Room Talk in its emerging virtual series, Inside the Vaults.
To see my list of book talk events scheduled so far, go here.
To preorder Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle To Get Inside, with a 30% discount and free shipping, go here and enter this code, RUSA30
Count me in with YOU, Tedi! Yes!
Melissa-- great post. No histrionics. We need to stay focused and this helps. Also, how nice to hear about your 2025 talk as part of the Inside the Vaults series-- !!