Lack or Choice?

Excusing criminality is not love of neighbor.

I was born in Los Angeles and spent most of my life in and around it. So this report from L.A. TV news caught my attention.

Take the five minutes to listen to it.

Too many people rationalize criminality as an inevitable response to “lack” — lack of opportunity, lack of education (often expressed as lack of spending on education), lack of access to systems due to bigotry — all kinds of lacks that don’t lead most people to commit crimes but are brought up to excuse those who do.

But listen to the report from L.A., and tell me how it isn’t about moral choice (actually, immoral choices.)

• Lack of education and opportunity? The people doing these crimes are smart, skillful, ambitious, energetic and busy.

• Lack of access to “the system”? Recycling and scrap businesses, some operating on an international level, are part and parcel of the operation.

There was a Superior Court Judge in the last part of Southern California I called home, who did an excellent program for local clergy on the dynamics and realities of domestic violence. Although she noted the common explanation, “Abusers were themselves abused,” the Judge, with her many years of experience in domestic violence cases, came to conclude that the common denominator in abusers was “a sense of entitlement” to their behavior.

And that’s what I’d say about the copper wire thieves. A sense of entitlement to have money on their terms, leading them to ignore their malign impact on their neighbors.

Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law, wrote the Apostle Paul (Romans 13:10). And the Law that God gave through Moses included You shall not steal (Exodus 20:15). We do better to draw some straight lines instead of twisting and turning explanations that prefer evil to love.

This is not a call to “lock them up and throw away the key,” as God’s hope is that sinners can change, not just stopping their bad behavior but turning with love toward their neighbors: Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need (Ephesians 4:28).

As the parent of a special needs son, I was enraged and heartbroken by the fraud perpetrated on Minnesota programs for children with autism and other vulnerable groups — programs that progressives were often the first to advocate and implement. So I was stunned when progressives discounted the fraud and covered for it.

Progressives used to be our humanistic counterweight to election year “tougher laws/build more prisons” boilerplate from the right. Progressives advocated ideas like restorative justice, rehabilitation and community reintegration instead of more and longer incarcerations — you could say they had absorbed the Christian sense that fallen lives could be restored. Now, our progressives are less humanistic and more political, seeing criminals as victims of (and therefore entitled “resistance”) to “the system” — while treating the law abiding as worthy of affliction on behalf of “social justice.”

This interest group approach to justice is another example of twisting and turning where a Biblical standard draws straight lines: You shall do no injustice in court. You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness shall you judge your neighbor (Leviticus 19:15). Ideology often destroys that Biblical baseline for decency — neighborliness. Jesus tells us to love our neighbor as ourselves, and, when pressed to give an ideological definition of who “counts” as a neighbor, told a provocative story of kindness meaning more than identity. (And he built the story around providing care for a crime victim).

Too many progressives have leaned into the idea that criminality is actually political resistance. Social disorder is seen as a way of preventing fascism. But the insights of a long ago friend from the left tell me otherwise…

I had a school pal who was a Communist. No joke — he was a thinker, had really absorbed the writings (not just slogans) of collectivist thinkers and was committed to Communism.

Needless to say, we didn’t agree on much politically. But he had a keen mind and would say things that made me stop and ponder.

One that sticks with me is his take on the musical Cabaret — at least on the way it was advertised to and understood by fans of both stage and cinema versions.

My Communist pal railed against the way that people spoke of it with big smiles and extolled a happy-clappy musical with fun characters. No, my friend declared, it is about how decadence paves the way for fascism! After watching the final scene of the Oscar winning 1972 film, I had to agree.

Excusing criminals — copper wire thieves, social program fraudsters, violent street criminals, any who show a marked disdain for their neighbors — creates chaos, which is as likely to enable fascism as it is to usher in progressive revolution. That’s just a political observation.

The spiritual and more signifcant observation for eternal matters is that excusing sociopathy betrays God’s Covenants announced through Moses and embodied by Jesus, which include all people as neighbors entitled to our love, equal esteem and mercy.