THE CONSCIENCE AND FLOOR: A Civic Essay Series

On July 16, 1984, Governor Mario Cuomo stood before the Democratic National Convention and told nearly eighty million viewers that this country was less a shining city on a hill than a tale of two cities, one where the ladders reach the top and one where they were pulled up before anyone climbing them today had a chance to use them. Government, he said, owes its citizens a floor, the way a family does not stop feeding a child who cannot yet earn a wage. Fifty-nine days later, he stood before the theology department at Notre Dame and said the opposite: that his own church's teaching, which he personally accepted, gave him no right to write it into law for citizens who did not share his faith. The same man. The same year. Two podiums, arguing what looks, on the surface, like two different disciplines. >In The Conscience and the Floor, Gerard Tod traces that line, what a citizen is asked to believe against what a citizen is owed to survive, from Kennedy's 1960 promise to keep his church out of the presidency, through Franklin Roosevelt's 1944 radio address proposing a second Bill of Rights, delivered from a chair because he was too ill that night to stand before the Congress he was addressing, to the Supreme Court's 2014 ruling that let a private employer's religious conviction reach into an obligation owed to someone else. This is not a book asking readers to take a side on any single issue. It is asking readers to notice which side of the line their own convictions actually belong on. Some beliefs are yours to keep. Some floors belong to everyone.