Impersonating Integrity

In 1846, midway through his stay at Walden, Henry David Thoreau spent the night in jail for refusing to pay his poll tax. He had withheld payment, he said, because he could not supporta government that endorsed slavery and waged an unjust war against Mexico. Later, in a pairof lectures he delivered to the Concord Lyceum, he called what he had done “civil disobedience.”

“Under a government which imprisons any unjustly,” Thoreau said, “the true place for a just man is also a prison.”

It is the absence of such moral gravity, the refusal to accept the inextricable link between conscience and consequence that makes Operation Rescue’s claim to share in Thoreau’s tradition hollow.

U.S. District Judge A. Wallace Tashima perceptively cited that fact Tuesday, when he found the group in contempt of an injunction against blockading California women’s clinics. “The essence of civil disobedience is to allow yourself to be punished,” Tashima said. “To deny responsibility, you become nothing more than ordinary lawbreakers . . . . It is simply hypocritical.”

In fact, though its leaders naturally insist otherwise, Operation Rescue is an abuse of the heroic moral tradition of civil disobedience.

Civil disobedience, particularly in a democracy, is one of the most profound acts of personal responsibility an individual can undertake. It deserves to be considered legitimate only if it meets one or more tests:

--It is addressed to a collective social conscience which, either through ignorance or denial, has refused to engage the issue at hand.

--Those who undertake it are otherwise disenfranchised from normal political participation.

--Other avenues of orderly, just redress are foreclosed.

Operation Rescue’s leaders claim their actions are sanctioned by the great tradition of civil disobedience that begins with Thoreau and runs through Gandhi to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. There are, however, profound differences among the actions of such men and those OperationRescue has urged on its adherents.

Thoreau, for example, confronted an historical situation in which nativist bigotry and rabid expansionism had made normative opposition to the Mexican War impossible. Gandhi was the disenfranchised colonial subject of an exploitative imperialist power. Dr. King faced a society in which Jim Crow had denied black people not only political participation but also access to a fair hearing in the local courts.

Are any of these historical precedents present in the case of Operation Rescue? The answer, clearly, is no. Operation Rescue’s leaders contend that is irrelevant, since their conduct is justified by what they see as the necessity to save lives. Judge Tashima wisely rejected that defense, since it resolves the thorny question of when life begins with an answer accessible only through faith.

When it comes to the question of abortion, the American conscience has been engaged, if conflicted, for more than two decades. The issue has been debated up, down and sideways onevery conceivable occasion and on every imaginable platform. Everyone who wished to make a moral judgment has had time to form his conscience.

Opponents of legal abortion can hardly be said to have been disenfranchised. They have made the question an election issue in constituencies at every level; people can and have been voted out of office for supporting or opposing a woman’s right to an abortion.

Finally, as the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Webster vs. Reproductive Services demonstrates, opponents of legal abortion have had complete access to thorough, fair court hearings.

If Operation Rescue is not a legitimate exercise of civil disobedience, what is it? It is, in fact, a public tantrum by people who seek to win through intimidation what they cannot achieve through politics or law. As such, it is not an appeal to our collective conscience but an attack on our collective rights.

It is not an assault on abortion but on the concept of pluralism itself.