Buckley on Mahony

William F. Buckley responds to Cardinal Mahony's call to disobey the proposed immigration law:

Now the good cardinal, whose motives we must as a matter of Christian forbearance accept as humanitarian, has got to be sharply rebuked by the Conference of Bishops. Begin with the basic question: The writing of the law is a democratic exercise. To call for disobedience to the law is acceptable behavior when such law transgresses upon the city of God. The laws that called for the annihilation of the Jewish race violated the city of God. Proposed laws that would punish citizens who deliberately help to defeat or to circumvent immigration laws aren't inherently defiant of the prerogatives of a democratic community. Cardinal Mahony's contumacy has to be rejected for what it is, never mind what the Senate ends up doing in the matter of formulating fresh rules to enforce policies that have not been enforced.

President Bush endorsed the House bill and asks the Senate to act on it. He hardly understands himself to be rejecting the canon of Christian behavior toward our fellow men by making the point that free and independent societies have the right to prescribe immigration codes, and need especially to reject such distortions of Christian dogma and practice as invite the wrong kind of attention to appropriate divisions between church and state.

Rob