Legality v. Morality

By Brooke Boniface

I was home in Los Angeles, this winter break trying to wait out the torential downpour with some friends when the conversation turned to politics.

"I hate illegal immigrants." He made the statement boldly and proudly, and his friends around him nodded in silent agreement.

"Well why?" I asked, a bit timidly. There were seven boys in the room, all of whom appeared to have the same opinion. On the other side, there was only me.

"Because they are breaking the law! They are basically murderers."

While this conversation continued, my mind went spinning off in different directions. I thought of a dozen different articles I could write for The Santa Clara, but for our first issue back, I decided to cover the difference between legality and morality.

Laws, according to Merriam Webster's dictionary, are "rules of conduct or action recognized as binding or enforced by a controlling authority." Morality, according to Merriam Webster's dictionary, "is the idea of right human conduct."

What the aforementioned boys failed to realize, however, is that legality and morality are often times out of sync.

In the United States alone, we have had hundreds of laws which allowed injustice to permeate our society. Slavery was once legal, as was segregation.

Additionally, things like homosexual intercourse and marriage with certain immigrants were once illegal.

All of these laws were once on the books in the United States. They were once monitoring and binding the activity of American citizens and residents.

But does that make them moral? Most people today would say no.

The founding of our nation is based upon the rejection of unfair and immoral laws. Our forefathers rebelled against the tyrannical King George to establish a new and free nation. What they did was illegal by all standards of English law, but they persevered because it was morally right.

Martin Luther King, Jr. advocated the breaking of immoral laws by saying, "to accept passively an unjust system is to cooperate with that system; thereby the oppressed become as evil as the oppressor."

In his lifetime, King was arrested 29 times. Breaking the law does not always mean that you have committed an immoral act, only an illegal one. Sometimes it means that you care about justice more than the consequences you will receive for breaking the law.

Furthermore, not all laws are of the same moral measure. The boy's equation of illegal immigrants with murderers was absolutely ridiculous.

The two people may have both broken laws but that does not mean that they have committed the same level of legal or moral crime.

There is a reason that the punishment for the murder of another human is much more stringent than the punishment for breaking the nation's immigration laws. The former discretion is much worse than the latter.

The law is not always moral, and it is people who have the strength of character to stand up to the system, to break immoral laws, who truly change society.

That being said, I am not advocating anarchy, or that all people everywhere yell "screw the authority" and do whatever they like.

But a little critical thought, rather than blind obedience and hatred of all "criminals" would be nice.

Brooke Boniface is a junior political science and history double major and the editor of the opinion section.