Roy Moore and Gavin Newsom as two peas in a pod?

As goes the goose, so goes the gander?

Glenn Reynolds observes:

It's not civil disobedience when it's done by someone who controls the machinery of government -- it's usurpation, even when it's in a cause I agree with.

"I think this is in effect an act of civil disobedience. What we are saying as a city and what I'm saying in particular is that we live in a time of emergency; we live in a time when the federal government is assuming powers which it has no right to assume under our laws and under our constitution."

I sympathized with the sheriffs who refused to comply with the Brady Act. I admire the attitude shown by Sheriff Jay Printz, of Ravalli County, Montana:

"I just run my Brady background check forms from my fax machine to my shredder. I don't do them," Printz said.

In a previous post, I mentioned possible "civil disobedience" by heterosexuals (and opined that San Francisco politicians had "beaten them to the punch") without taking much time to think this through, and now that I am attempting to do that, I find myself more pissed than ever at the deliberate widening of the Culture War by all sides.

When I was a college student, no one called Richard Nixon's "Saturday Night Massacre" (in which he defied Congress by sacking the Special Prosecutor, the Attorney General, and the Deputy Attorney General) an act of civil disobedience either. (Nor, interestingly, do I remember anyone claiming Nixon's underlings were engaged in civil disobedience....)

In those days, the term civil disobedience was applied to citizens like Rosa Parks who defied laws they considered immoral.

But did civil disobedience start with a government official? What about British Lord Chancellor Thomas More? Was he the "father of civil disobedience"?

It is a sign of our distemper that Thomas More is today so often regarded as a hero of civil disobedience, a man who refused to obey law with which he was in profound moral disagreement. That is a considerable distortion of the truth, and it was not More’s understanding of his motives. For him, in a very real sense, law was morality. It is equally true that for More morality was superior to law and was the standard by which law must be judged.

More saw Luther’s advocacy of lawless law to be at the heart of their culture war. Luther spoke for the individual conscience and so necessarily attacked the authority of precedent and tradition in the law. More’s view of law and the duty of judges was quite different. R. W. Chambers quotes him as saying: "If the parties will at my hands call for justice, then, all were it my father stood on the one side, and the devil on the other, his cause being good, the devil should have right." Luther and many modern jurists would reinterpret the law to do the devil down, and the moderns, at least, would reserve to themselves authority to decide which is the father and which the devil.

....

[More's] refusal to take the oath should not, of course, be viewed as disobedience at all. There was a law higher than Henry’s and Parliament’s, and More knew that the oath violated that law. There were few other occasions on which that could be said with certainty. More, an exemplary courtier, servant, and confidante of the king, did not suppose that God’s will was clear enough to require refusal to serve the king even when his purposes seemed to More unjust; he even assisted the king in temporal struggles against the Pope, as, given his understanding of his respective duties, he should have. God’s law is not often clear to the tangled mind of man, but there was a central fact about which More could have no doubt: Christ did not leave behind a book but a Church, and that Church must not be divided. As to this ultimate thing, he, at last, knew where God was and what He wanted. More was caught between two authorities and the question for him, the commands of both being clear, was which authority was superior. At this extremity, God was no longer too subtle for him, and More obeyed God’s law and went to his death. This was not disobedience but obedience, a thought he expressed in his last words as he placed his head on the block: "I die the king’s good servant, but God’s first."

II

Individualism in the law, as in matters of faith, produces the substitution of private morality for public law and duty. This is precisely what More thought Luther was encouraging in his own day, and it is even more prominent in ours. That may be seen in the growth of legal nullification, the refusal to be bound by external rules, that is not only widespread among the American people but, more ominously, in the basic institutions of the law. More applied his injunction as much to the judge on the bench as to rioters in the street. We all recognize rioters as civil disobedients but we are less likely to recognize that the judge who ignores law or who creates constitutional law out of his own conscience is equally civilly disobedient. In 1975 Alexander Bickel, in The Morality of Consent, recounted the then recent American experience with disrupters in the streets, but added: "The assault upon the legal order by moral imperatives was not only or perhaps even most effectively an assault from the outside." It came as well from a Court that cut through law to do what it considered "right" and "good." Our law schools now construct theoretical justifications for that particularly corrosive form of civil disobedience, explaining that judges should create, and enforce as constitutional law, individual rights that are nowhere to be found in the Constitution.

I think it is politics. That does not alter the definition of civil disobedience. (In any case, a religious motivation should not give a law-breaker any special rights over and above Lockean "natural law" or simple conscience.)

If More, then Moore. If More and Moore, then, yes, Newsom! I agree with Glenn Reynolds that the same standard should apply.

The Culture War still sucks, though. It appeals to the worst in just about everyone. What good will come of the FMA? The lining up of people in eight-block queues to obtain legally meaningless licenses? More Culture War fodder? More politicization of how we live? More sanctimonious claptrap and moralistic poses from all sides?

The so-called "Federal Marriage Amendment" is off to a great start.

More to come, I am sure....

MORE (no More puns, I promise): I am delighted to see that I am not alone in making gun analogies! (via Glenn Reynolds.)

A FACT YOU NEED TO KNOW: President's Day (aka "Presidents' Day") was created by Richard Nixon in 1971 in what has been described as a non-binding proclamation. This web site makes the Nixon proclamation sound almost sinister,

[T]he holiday has become popularly known as President's Day because of an elusive, and unconfirmed, proclamation by President Nixon that declared the third Monday in February to be a holiday to honor all presidents.

Maybe I should reread the title of this post!