Legality

The orange-tinted authoritarian fool

mutters with mocking arrogance, “I’m allowed

to do it”—that is, to pardon a woman in jail

for pimping and raping children and handing them

over to powerful people exempt from sanction,

elites accustomed to getting whatever they want.

The law—the highest law, the Constitution—

indeed allows him to pardon any person

in the hope that miscarried justice can be recarried.

But no one can miss the evil intent in bargains

with evil people—not even the antisocial

and self-centered boosters of the orange barker

who barks self-aggrandizing smarm at their blind egos

and sells them Brooklyn bridges day after day.

"Lex injusta non est lex," said Augustine.

So too, a just law wielded with unjust cruelty

cannot be tolerated by decent souls

who care about more than themselves and their own desires.

The decent, seeing the evil possessing power,

cannot but stand on conscience, must resist.

_______________________________

Slavery was legal. So was apartheid. So was sterilizing poor women. So was child labor. So were workhouses, pogroms, and forced conversions. Still legal, in many places, are caging children, bombing civilians with ruthless precision, banning books, arresting journalists, and denying people care. These things may be legal. They are also shameful.

Legality gives the perpetrators an excuse. They can always claim that they are just following protocol. “It’s not our decision. The system made the decision. We are only enforcing the law.” Who uses the letter of the law to break its spirit? Someone who wants power more than justice.

Thoreau said that the only place for a just man under an unjust government is in prison. Martin Luther King, Jr. pointed out that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal. Legality does not justify anything. The law can ratify cruelty as easily as it ratifies kindness. But conscience is the higher court. And when it speaks clearly, no legislation can pardon silence.

America is not exceptional in this regard. The detentions are legal. The speech bans are legal. The surveillance is legal. The gerrymandering is legal. Both exonerating the powerful and punishing the powerless are legal. The forms and the filings check off the boxes. But no paperwork certifies morality. Our government can violate every decent instinct and still pass constitutional muster. If a thing is unjust, it remains unjust—even if enacted by a legislature, enforced by a court, and accepted by the public.

But insofar as it is unjust, it is a form of violence.

We know the difference between right and wrong. Even the worst among us feel it like heat on the back of the neck. When a child is screaming behind chain-link fencing, no decent adult asks for a legal opinion. When a teacher is fired for quoting controversial writings, or a voter purged for living in the wrong zip code, or a rape victim forced to bear a child, we do not condone the statutes that permit such things. We know they are wrong. And we know the judges who ratify them are wrong. Do we really prefer unjust rules to justice itself?

Law is not absolution. Nazis who followed the laws of their regime were brought before a world tribunal that judged those laws to be evil. A society that substitutes procedure for principle decays from within.

If the law offends your conscience, break the law with dignity.