Lessons in Civics and Tolerance

Note for Instapundit readers: Glenn Reynolds linked to this post in the context of the Zimmerman-Martin incident.  The direct connection is mainly in the penultimate paragraph, below, but the principles are broadly related in larger ways.  For one, Erick Erickson mentions the case at the link to which I’m responding.  For another, what I write of the President could just as easily apply to the race hucksters and mainstream media.  As I asked on Twitterabout a Providence Journal editorial that called Zimmerman a “white man (of Hispanic descent)” — are they ignorant of or hiding the fact that he’s also of black descent? If the latter, that’s a grievously wrong attack on racial harmony.


Andrew McCarthy gives a good lesson on when it is appropriate for the President of the United States to use his power as the chief executive in contravention of the law and, by contrast, what President Barack Obama has been doing:

… note that this is a matter of legal legitimacy, not policy preference. Faithful execution, abiding by the president’s oath of office, means enforcing even those laws a president disagrees with on policy grounds if the laws are plainly constitutional. The Constitution gives Congress a wide berth to enact unwise laws, to say nothing of perfectly sensible laws that are uncongenial to a hard-left ideologue. There is nothing wrong with a president’s working to change those laws; in the meantime, though, he breaks his solemn pledge by failing to enforce them.

Bona fide concerns over resource allocation and constitutionality are narrow exceptions to the general rule that obliges presidents to execute the laws.

While it’s always possible to bog down any discussion of laws and their enforcement in legalistic arguments — the law is a field that debates the definition of “is,” after all — the standard by which the people judge their elected officials should not be the standard of innocence and reasonable doubt that exists in the court room.  Unilaterally declaring that key provisions of the Affordable Care Act will not be enforced until after the next election is not the same as declining to prosecute some criminals because the executive branch lacks sufficient agents, and the administration is clearly not doing it out of belief that the law is not constitutional.

It’s political manipulation of our system of government that takes advantage of the difficulty of anybody’s calling the president on his actions. As McCarthy closes by saying, that “is how a dictatorship works.”

This brings me to some musings by Erick Erickson of Redstate, who laments that everything has become political in the United States:

When I point out I find some things the President does, like talking about sci-fi, endearing and find Michelle Obama to be a very beautiful First Lady, my conservative friends go insane. While I was at CNN they were convinced I had sold out to the liberal media. Now, at Fox, it just perplexes them.

When I talk about my faith and my views on gay marriage or abortion, liberals are convinced I must be lying when I say I have gay friends and pro-abortion friends and we get along just fine and they are wonderful people. Surely I must think they are going to hell and how could those people be friends with me. Folks, I think we’re all going to hell, but by the grace of God. …

While I tend to think the left is worse about it than the right, I’m sure liberals think otherwise. But why must everything be so damn political? The President of the United States is a good father with a lovely wife and I disagree with both on pretty much everything. But I do not hate them.

I largely agree with Erickson, inasmuch as I flinch whenever I hear one person call another “evil.”  People are not evil.  My Christian view is that people are made in the image of God, but with free will that allows them to be misled.  Any other philosophy by which people derive a moral code must have a similar principle if it is to be worthy of serious consideration.

Abstractions are evil, and actions premised on them can be a manifestation of evil.  But people cannot, of their essence, be evil incarnate.  Consequently, we ought always to be able to make human connections with other people and (to some extent) to be able to empathize with them.

That said, we have an obligation to ourselves, to our community, and to people who are doing wrong to enforce some basic sense of weighted morality.  Being attractive sci-fi fans might help humanize the First Couple (by which I mean it makes it easier for us to connect and empathize with them), but it sends an unhealthy signal all around if we’re able to compartmentalize everything so thoroughly that we ignore (say) the total undermining of our civic structure and national cohesion in order to talk Star Trek affably with the person overseeing it all.

On the other end of this spectrum, returning to Erickson, some very important figures in my life have been gay, and yet I do believe that homosexuality is morally wrong. I also believe that divorce is morally wrong.  I also believe that many things I don’t quite manage to stop myself from doing are morally wrong (although I won’t list them for your reading pleasure).

To treat every wrong that can be done as if it makes an untouchable of its doer would itself be a tremendous wrong (and exhausting, too).  That doesn’t mean that nothing is so wrong as to make the doer repugnant.  Somebody who takes the occasion of a divorce as an opportunity to leverage his or her children in order to cause misery for their other parent should not, perhaps, be welcome with smiles at the next cocktail party.

It’s not easy.  It’s easier to give in to hate, in one direction, or to divide up our responses to people so completely that we can effectively forget what they do wrong while we’re admiring what they do charmingly.  But that’s being human.

In my judgment, as a human being, it is an extremely serious wrong to dig out the foundations of the United States of America — by doing through fiat and regulation what could not be done by legislation, by fomenting racial strife to divide Americans, by allowing (or even tolerating) multiple government agencies to target political opponents and impede their political activities, by outright lying and deceiving voters on matters of great national importance, by spying on Americans without cause, and by taking any number of other actions in which this President has engaged to further his political objectives.

Declining to put those considerations aside for a friendly golf game is not to give in to partisan politicization of one’s entire life.  Forcing people who do grievous wrong to face up to it may be the fullest expression of empathy.  It’s to acknowledge that human beings are not just the sum of a bunch of different qualities and attributes, but conscious beings who have an obligation to bring morality and conscience to everything they do.

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