Law exists in order to promote the common good. Just laws
ensure the order, freedom and security necessary for individuals to pursue
authentic goods for themselves and for the society in which they belong. Therefore
it is clearly necessary for men and women to obey the law and, to some extent,
to conform their own actions to those laws made by legitimate authority.
Throughout the western world there are societies, such as our own, that have
long enjoyed the blessings of the rule of law, and consequently most people
respect the law and place a high value on obeying it.
This attitude towards the law, while on the whole good and
necessary, can unfortunately be harmful when individuals fail to recognise that
human laws, being the creation of man, have no sure guarantee of being in
conformity to the natural moral law. This is especially the case with laws that
are introduced at the behest of an organised minority to further an ideologically motivated agenda, rather than being based on the surer ground of precedent and custom.
Unfortunately most people, brought up to regard obeying the law as a one of the
most important social virtues, often find it difficult to conceive that political,
social, intellectual and economic elites could have collectively committed
themselves to enshrining a grave moral evil in law. This is seen most
tragically in the case of those who, while having no personal inclination to
support or promote abortion, allow their consciences to be lulled, and their
response to be muted, by its legality.
What should we say to those who act as if that which is
legal is always right? Or those who presume that what is sanctioned by the
highest authority in a supposedly civilised nation cannot also be a grave abuse
of human dignity? For convincing evidence we need look no further than the
degrading treatment of those of African descent in the United States.
No less a document than the Constitution of the United States was held to have enshrined slavery in
law. That same document was interpreted by the Supreme Court as denying
citizenship to those of African race. These federal acts were replicated by
state laws across the Union. Laws of
segregation persisted until the 1960s. The legality of slavery was regarded as beyond
argument; the legal arguments were accepted as watertight; the right to own slaves was far
more deeply enshrined than the alleged right to abortion; yet was it not wrong
nonetheless?
