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Column A nation of laws or compassion?
By JOAN CHITTISTER
Two basic American truisms --
Give me your tired, your poor and a nation under law --
have collided all over the front pages of every newspaper in the United States.
Before the new Bush administration had even been officially launched, George
Bushs nominee for secretary of labor, Linda Chavez, ran aground on the
tension between the two ideals. In one nomination, compassion and order, mercy
and justice, wound up at odds. The danger is that as a people we may heed one
part of the story and miss the implications of the other. That could be the
gravest mistake of all. The fact is that, in the end, whichever of these two
stories dominates historical memory may well mark the character of this
nation.
The trouble with truth is that it comes in stripes of different
colors. There are two truths here: The first is that Marta Mercado, an abused
and undocumented alien from Guatemala, lived in the Chavez home for two years
doing odd jobs around the house in return for room, board and a bit of spending
money. The second is that immigration and labor laws require entry permits of
foreign nationals that are often difficult to get, as well as minimum wage
scales and taxation standards that have no legal meaning without legal
documentation. Those not certified by the law have no claims under the law.
Obviously, both positions are laudable. One is an answer to
charity; the other a response to justice. The situation of a homeless woman
cries out for mercy; the responsibility to pay aliens a just wage guards
against exploitation and domestic slavery. The question is, which ideal should
prevail and when and what is the cost of choosing one over the other?
Clearly, underneath the headlines of a first-round confirmation
loss lies an even greater problem for the soul of a nation than that of a
failed political nomination. What Linda Chavez did was clearly illegal. She
harbored an illegal alien. Laws passed to stop the flow of immigrants across
the Mexican-American border require employees to certify the citizenship of all
workers. Another set of laws requires all employers and employees to pay Social
Security taxes and unemployment insurance. Chavez did not require proof of
citizenship and she and Mercado, the employee -- if she was really an
employee in the truest sense of the word -- did not pay taxes.
Chavez and Mercado broke the law.
What is not equally clear, however, is whether or not what either
of them did was immoral as well as illegal. Mercado was fighting for her life
-- a situation in which the rules of the game change for everyone. Chavez, a
bearer of Hispanic history herself, was faced with the stranger at the door, of
which the scripture speaks when it reminds Israel to take care of the widow and
the orphan, providing them food and clothing for you were strangers in
the land of Egypt (1 Deuteronomy 19). If we allow ourselves to think
back, we know the case only too well: So were all our émigré
parents strangers in the land -- long before immigration quotas and
taxes turned out the light on Lady Libertys torch.
There is so often a world of difference between what is legal and
what is moral. In search of one, George W. Bush -- the compassionate
conservative who will restore dignity to the White House --
just stubbed his toe on the other. Many of us do. Perhaps, if the process of
becoming spiritual adults is ever to be truly complete, all of us must.
Sometime or other in life, we are each confronted with a choice between keeping
one set of laws or honoring another. The simplistic approach is to assume that
the law must always be kept. The anarchic approach is to assume that it must
never be kept. Surely moral valor -- often moral courage -- lies someplace
between the two.
There is a price to be paid, of course, if a nation of laws is
ever to be stretched enough to become a nation of compassion. The suffragists,
Martin Luther King Jr., the Berrigans, Deitrich Bonhoeffer, Nelson Mandela, all
bowed to the laws even while they broke them. But break them they did, so that
the rest of us could finally see the law above the law and repair the one that
was so clearly inferior, so clearly less human, so clearly beneath what we
claimed to do and who we claimed to be.
Linda Chavez, and the first two Clinton nominees for attorney
general, incidentally, whose nominations soured for the very same reason as
this one, have paid the price of the law, too. They were denied cabinet-level
positions in a new administration. In this most recent case, Linda Chavez is no
longer nominee for secretary of labor. Whether that was a good appointment or
not on other grounds, we will never know.
But several things we will remember for a long time, thanks to
these now defunct candidacies: The first is that as a nation, at least where
aliens are concerned, we have yet to resolve the tension between the needs of
people and the legal niceties of a nation under law. The second is
that if Chavez had obeyed the law she would have turned her back on what she
herself felt to be morally imperative. The third is that we have yet to see
whether or not any purely law-and-order administration can really restore
dignity to the White House.
Benedictine Sr. Joan Chittister writes from Erie, Pa.
National Catholic Reporter, February 2,
2001
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