We cannot -- we will not -- comply

I am not up on my Catholic hierarchy except that I am pretty sure Cardinals beat Padres.  If San Antonio ever gets a baseball team, I hope they aren't named the Popes -- maybe the Bishops.  Bishops are good pieces in chess, which is less entertaining than baseball.

The reason I bring this up is because I do not know if Bishop Olmsted is the Bishop of Phoenix or if there's an Archbishop of Phoenix.  I do know that Bishop Olmsted flipped l'oiseau to the little tyrant Obama and his vulturous sidekick Sebelius at HHS.  You can view the Bishop's letter in PDF via this page.  There he explains about this little thing called the First Amendment in a dusty old document written by DWGs.  As old and "fundamentally flawed" as Obama thinks the Constitution is, Bishop Olmsted appears somewhat offended that the Half-Kenyan Bastard wants to wipe his scrawny ass with it.

And so am I.  You see, when it comes right down to it, if somebody wants to disobey the law, they can.  For most of us, lawbreaking results in negative consequences.  If, however, the lawbreaker happens to be the President of the United States or the Attorney General or the Secretary of the Treasury, Secretary of Health and Human Services ("human services" has always sounded pretty sinister to me anyway), Secretary of Homeland Security (I thought it sounded like something out of the Third Reich when Bush came up with it, let alone now) or the head of the EPA, he or she appears to be exempt from said consequences.

Faced with this apparent inequity, most of us growl under our breath, call a talk radio show, write a blog post, or kick the dog, and, in the end, comply because it is usually less trouble than fighting the "authorities".  However, most of us do not have the might, power, and prestige of the Roman Catholic Church behind us.  When the Vicar of Christ tells you, "Go for it, man, I got your back", you can tell Uncle Sam to bite it.

By standing up to the government, the good Bishop has done a service for all of us.  He has pointed out that an unlawful demand is, by definition, not to be obeyed.  "We cannot -- we will not -- comply with this unjust law."  The Bishop does not encourage violence, rather he calls upon all of us to pray, adding, "Without God, we can do nothing; with God, nothing is impossible."

I agree.  It is a crucial time, and prayer can yet change the course of this nation.  We should have been praying all along, but it is not too late.  I will pray, and I will disobey.

As I hope I have made clear, I am not encouraging anyone to act in a manner that causes a person to get into trouble or to do anything illegal.  Speaking for myself alone, I know many things that are legal are not right, and some things that are right are illegal. In my world, I have drawn a line.  I will not state publicly where that line is, nor will I warn anyone when it is crossed, but it is a line of finality, a line that could be justified to any reasonable person who is not a government-sponsored thug.

I refer again to one of the great moral teachers of the last century Alexander Solzhenitsyn and his warning against being too meek.