Over at the Gazette, there’s an editorial about whether a local school superintendent should have sent a message about immigration to residents without consulting his school board. See, Our Views: Superintendent sends the wrong message.
I’ll set aside the issue of immigration, and address the deeper issue of the Gazette‘s reasoning on obedience to the law. Here’s what the publication contends:
We’re certainly willing to concede problems with current immigration law, but we cannot support breaking laws we don’t like. That’s not how our democracy works.
Under this view, the law – indeed any law passed with a majority in its community – must be obeyed. There’s no room for civil disobedience here, so Parks should have stayed at the back of the bus, and King should not have marched in communities where a majority insisted against marches.
The Gazette may truly believe this, of course: that one must live with majoritarian rule, no matter how unjust, with no measures of civil disobedience. There’s something selfish, however, about men who (presumably) would claim a right of their forefathers to use military means to secure independence from a British majority who would now deny to living residents on this continent the right even to use the peaceful measures of civil disobedience.
It’s worth observing that the editorialist doesn’t confine the paper’s view to immigration only, but to all political and legal matters without qualification (“we cannot support breaking laws we don’t like”). That the paper ties support of the law not to justice but to the rule of the whole population begs the question of how the Gazette would object – if at all – to majority rule by legislation in places that oppress political, ethnic, or religious minorities. Shh, hush, hush: you mustn’t make a fuss, it just won’t do!
My forefathers fought in support of the Revolution centuries ago to establish the American Republic, and my family today recognizes a natural right of civil disobedience within the Republic for people, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, or gender.
I’ve written before that most local publications are useful now not in themselves, but for what they tell about how local insiders think (however poorly) about political or social issues. The Gazette’s editorial is one more example of how shallow that thinking truly is.