Cardinal Mahony and the "Casual Defiance of Law"

Joe Knippenberg criticizes Cardinal Mahony's public pronouncements on the immigration debate, particularly his call for civil disobedience:

He’s right that, literally, the bill against which he was reacting . . . makes it a crime to “assist, encourage, direct, or induce” a person to enter or remain in the U.S., “knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact” that he or she lacks legal status. While directed principally at smugglers, it could conceivably be enforced against those who provide social services to illegal aliens. But Mahony has to know that this prospect is unlikely in the extreme. Any prosecutor who brought criminal charges against religious charity workers would have to have a death wish. The Cardinal’s flamboyant gesture can serve only to dramatize and publicize his distaste for this particular piece of legislation, a move of which any ordinary political actor would be proud. Look at all the attention he and his cause received!

But a Cardinal ought not to regard himself as an ordinary political actor. Mahony ought to have thought about two other consequences of his gesture. First, by implicitly comparing the Church to those at whom the law is really directed, he gives the brazenly cynical traffickers in humanity moral and political cover. They’re simply humanitarians, they can say, just like their brothers and sisters in the Church. Second, by loudly encouraging defiance of this law, he’s undermining respect for law altogether, as well as for the regular process by which law is made. If in fact he and his colleagues recognize the rights and responsibilities of sovereign nations, then they should be careful to acknowledge and uphold the legitimate role of legislators, as well as the duty of citizens to obey the law.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean to deny that there is a higher—or natural—law, in the light of which ordinary legislation can be judged. I’m quarreling with Cardinal Mahony’s cheap tactical deployment of it, and the casual defiance of law that it inevitably encourages.

Rob