Government’s Sanctuary Case

The “lawyering” that Yoder writes about is just what the Sanctuary defendants don’t want or need. The focus of their work is to bring justice to light--a justice that the U.S. immigration law at present does not allow for victims of death squads. Sanctuary workers act not to break laws, but to mold them into a more humane shape. They challenge immigration policy that readily admits and exploits refugees from Soviet countries, but denies entry and temporary residence to refugees from dictatorships this Administration has chosen to support.

Yoder compares the Sanctuary movement protecting refugees from El Salvador and Guatemala to the anti-slavery movement, and rightly. But “defiance and even riots” are not on the Sanctuary agenda, nor would these people tolerate violence.

But the comparison to earlier days in Europe when the church was more powerful than the state is far-fetched. This is not a church vs. state conflict, but a serious, intentional experiment of church members risking themselves to aid homeless and helpless people, and to test their own faith that true justice will win out over cruelty and deception in our government policies.

As to judges, juries and others not being “qualified to assess” moral issues, our present deterioration as a nation of violence is due not to our lack of qualifications to judge moral issues, but to our refusal to act from a base of reasoned moral judgments at every level of our corporate lives.

A value-free society is a contradiction in terms. We get together as societies because of shared moral values. But our laws are obeyable only to the extent that they reflect those values. When they do not, they must and will be challenged by gentle disobedience. To disobey them is not a crime, but a refusal to commit crimes under the name of law. In other words, what is legal is not always moral.

JEAN GERARD

Temple City