On a July afternoon in 2019, I found myself in a large, sun-dappled room within one of America’s great estates. An assemblage of distinguished jurists, Ivy League professors, nonprofit leaders, journalists, and theologians sat around me in a half circle. I was trying to be on my best behavior, but I blurted out a word dirty enough to make them blanch. In my defense, I thought it was what I had been summoned there to do. An independent commission had spent the previous year contemplating the