They don't care if it's wrong or if it's right -- just if it's illegal

I stood waiting in the checkout line at the Walmart on U.S. 501 between Carolina Forest and Coastal Carolina University.

A couple of rows away, a sign announced that selling cigarettes to kids is not just illegal – it is wrong.

Thank God for that sign. I didn’t have to sort out whether it was just illegal or actually wrong.

That’s one of the most confusing things about the world today – you can do something illegal that can't possibly be wrong -- except to certain types of busybodies.

Take, for example, this horrible sex crime, as reported by Kristine Gill of the Scripps Howard News Service:

NAPLES, Fla. - The assistant principal of an elementary school called law enforcement to report a "possible sex crime" after two students shared a kiss.

Deputies were dispatched Wednesday to Orange River Elementary School after Assistant Principal Margaret Ann Haring telephoned her concern.

Haring told deputies she had two students, both under 12, who kissed while in physical education class. Haring said one of them was debating about who liked who more.

The student then went over and kissed the other. The smooch was witnessed by a teacher.

"This incident is more of a simple assault, though by definition there would have to be a victim," Sgt. Stephanie Eller said.

Exactly. There would have to be a victim. But our world is now full of victimless crimes.

Sometimes, law enforcement officials just have to imagine the possibility of a victim. And apparently, you might be a threat if you’re reading a book. Charles Oliver notes:

Folk singer Vance Gilbert says he was pulled off a flight from Boston to Washington by Transportation Security Administration agents and officers from the Massachusetts State Police and questioned about his reading habits. They apparently found it suspicious that he was reading a book about vintage aircraft while flying.

He had to be questioned because everyone knows you can take control of a high-tech jetliner with a little information about old flying machines.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing new about our nonsensical American disconnect between what’s wrong and what’s illegal.

In his 1994 book The Death of Common Sense, Philip Howard told this story of counterproductive laws:

In the winter of 1988, Mother Teresa's nuns of the Missionaries of Charity walked through the snow in New York's South Bronx in their saris and sandals looking for abandoned buildings to convert into homeless shelters. They found two, which New York offered them at $1 each. The nuns set aside $670,000 for the reconstruction, then, for a year-and-a-half, they went from hearing room to hearing room seeking approval for the project.

Providence, however, was no match for law. New York's building code requires a lift in all new or renovated multiple-story buildings of his type. Installing a lift would add upwards of $130,000 to the cost. Mother Teresa didn't want to devote that much money to something that wouldn't really help the poor. But the nuns were told the law couldn't be waived even if a lift made no sense.

The plan for the shelter was abandoned. In a polite letter to the city, the nuns noted that the episode "served to educate us about the law and its many complexities."

I can’t prove it, but I’m pretty sure those Sisters walked away saying, “What total bullshit!”

Canadians, as you might expect, are even sillier, considering another dispatch from Oliver’s blog:

Officials at Earl Beatty Junior and Senior Public School in Toronto have banned all balls that aren't made of sponge. The move comes after a parent was hit in the back of the head with a soccer ball.

That parent is mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.

Perhaps we can take comfort knowing that such nonsense happens overseas, too. Oliver writes:

Dinah and Stig Mason took four acres of neglected and overgrown land in Devon, England, and turned it into a small farm and orchard. They also took a small horse barn on the property and turned it into a home, and local officials say that is too much. The land is zoned for agriculture, not a residence. So they evicted the Masons from their home.

Maybe it’s time to bring our idea of illegal and our idea of wrong closer together.

-Colin Foote Burch

Comments

[Roger Yale]

Interesting read, Colin!

[Colin]

Thanks, Roger! Hopefully we'll get some more comments stirred up in here!