Have you ever deliberately broke the law? Mea Culpa! Mea Culpa! I have many times in my life. I grew up with an aversion to rules and a definite bias towards the idea that “rules were made to be broken.” Sometimes this has gotten me into trouble but other times it has been something I actually feel proud of. You see, I do believe that there are stupid and even evil rules and laws.
Lets start with the most obvious as an example of laws that were not only bad but evil. In respect to slavery there are many such examples. Let’s take just two that make my point. The very first concerns the legalization of slavery. Early slave laws recognizing the practice in the US were written well before the constitution or the US was a nation. Massachusetts is considered the first colony to recognize slavery as a legal institution in 1641. Most of the other colonies soon passed laws legalizing the practice. Once the colonies became a country and formed a constitution many Federal laws were passed to condone slavery, and these were supported by the Supreme Court. Two such laws that are notorious today are the “Fugitive Slave Act of 1793” and the “Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.”
Who today could support such laws? Laws that treated individuals of another color as little better than animals. People (slaves) could be beaten, lashed, chained and bred not to mention worked to death so that some people could profit from their labor. Would it have been wrong to say that these laws were acts of evil? Should we obey laws that are clearly evil?
For my second example, we turn to Nazi Germany and its Reign of Terror against the Jewish population of Europe. Over the centuries there have been many laws passed by European countries demonstrating an overt prejudice against the Jewish population. However, the Nazis took this prejudice to new levels of persecution and eventually genocide.
The first significant law enacted by Hitler that targeted the Jewish population in Germany was the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” passed on April 7, 1933. This law was designed to isolate and exclude Jews from participation in public life. It banned them from holding government jobs or participating in professions such as doctors, teachers, and lawyers.
Much like we are now seeing in the USA today (albeit for a different purpose), there was a progression of laws in Germany to escalate the violence and discrimination against Jews. The first laws seemed to be ones that people could live with but eventually they led to laws that were so evil that even Hitler was afraid of them being recorded. I refer to Hitler’s “Final Solution.” There may not have been any recorded laws, but the facts of the Holocaust and Genocide cannot be denied. Eichmann claimed at his trial that he was only following orders to expedite in the most efficient manner the extermination of every Jew in Europe and Russia.
Could you live in a country like Germany was in the 1930’s and 40’s? What if we started deporting legal American citizens from the USA to prison camps in South America or Asia? Would you obey such orders?
When we first came down here to Arizona in 2010, there was a great deal of discrimination directed against legal citizens who were of Mexican or Spanish Heritage. One infamous law was the Arizona Senate Bill 1070 (SB 1070), enacted in 2010, which included a provision that allowed police to question people about their immigration status if there was “reasonable suspicion” they were in the country unlawfully. They were obliged to “Show me your Papers” and Mexican American citizens were often profiled and stopped because they “looked” Mexican. A friend of mine who lives in Tucson and is a musician wrote a song called “Show me Your Papers” which spoofed the law with some very humorous lyrics.
There were other laws passed in Arizona making it a crime to help immigrants coming over the border who might be undocumented. The problem with these laws is that many immigrants legal and illegal do not speak English. How in the hell are you going to ask them if they have papers?
One day about ten years ago, I was driving in a rural part of Arizona through the desert when I saw a young man hitchhiking on the side of the road. I stopped to see where he was going. I asked him if he needed some water since it was a very hot day. He nodded his head yes and I gave him a bottle of water. Down here you are stupid if you do not keep extra water in your car. He then handed me a piece of paper. On it was a hand drawn map that showed some directions and a motel at the end of the arrows on the map. I asked him where he wanted to go. He simply pointed at the motel. The name of the motel was on the map, and I knew where it was.
I was on my way home and it was only about three miles from where I lived. I motioned for him to jump in my car. He climbed in and off we went with no conversation since it was obvious he did not speak English. I pulled up to the motel and he got out of my car. He turned around and in his hand, he held a bunch of fifty-dollar US bills. He handed one to me. I shook my head and said, “Gracias but no thank you.” He smiled, left my car for the motel and we both waved goodbye as I drove off.
Did I break the law? Was he an “illegal” immigrant? Should I have just left him on the side of the road in 100 + temperatures? Should I have driven him to the police department? Frankly, I don’t give a damn what the law said back then. I saw someone who needed help, and I helped him. Christians are fond of saying “WWJD”, meaning What would Jesus Do? If you are at all familiar with the parable of the Good Samaritan in the New Testament, you know what Jesus would do.
There are good laws and there are bad laws. Pope Pius the XII once said that he had no problems with the good friars in Minnesota making illegal whiskey during prohibition because they were not breaking God’s law but only man’s law. I claim to be no saint nor even a Christian. However, I do believe that some laws whether backed by the Supreme Court or backed by an Executive who can make no claim on morality or virtue are evil and deserve to be broken or ignored. One caveat is that you must be willing to suffer the consequences of breaking such laws. No one may be on your side. It might be years or decades before attitudes change, and people realize how heinous some laws are.
Conclusions:
- Only fools and cowards obey laws that are evil.
- We have a right to dispute laws that are inhumane or that violate long-held principles of morality and ethics.
- We may be punished for breaking a law but we all must be willing to take risks if we want to build a better world.
- Don’t break the law simply because it inconveniences you. Only break laws that are not in the common good or that make other people suffer without good cause.
- Some things are evil no matter what the law says.
If you would like to pursue this issue further, here are two excellent articles by Michael Corthell which I will list below with a hyperlink to them.
“The President Who Breaks the Law and the Court That Lets Him”, July 16, 2025
Aging Capriciously 