When it was all said and done, there was no real surprise that the Escondido City Council voted 3-2 Wednesday night in support of an ordinance penalizing those who rent to illegals, thus becoming the first such city in California. Short of someone in the council majority of Marie Waldron, Ed Gallo, and Sam Abed buckling in the intense spotlight, this ordinance was going to pass. By all accounts, any such buckling was not going to happen.
There was also no surprise over the tenor of the debate, the huge turnout for the council meeting, the media attention, the ACLU sticking its nose in, the…should I go on? We’ve seen controversial social debates before.
What is somewhat of a surprise, although perhaps it shouldn’t be, is the vehemence with which so many people — not just in Escondido and National City, but everywhere — are willing to stand up and advocate for that which even they admit is illegal.
Historically, even typically, these kinds of debates are along the lines of differing interpretations of constitutionality, over just what is illegal and what is not. The debate over providing health care and education to children of illegal immigrants was once not about the fact that the parents are in the United States illegally. That was a given. It was about differing opinions of whether it is proper, whether it is constitutional, to provide services to their children, who by no fault of their own are here.
In recent years, that debate has increasingly become about something else, about whether it is appropriate to provide services, housing, jobs, drivers licenses, you name it, to those who are clearly by their own actions in this country illegally. Not, mind you, whether those providing and benefiting from the services can get away with it, but whether it is okay for them to get away with it.
The debate has shifted. When our political disagreements become not about whether something is defined as illegal, but instead about whether something that is illegal is ok anyway, have we not taken relativism to a new low?
In 1983’s "How Democracies Perish," Jean-Francois Revel wrote about the Achilles heel of free nations ultimately being the very freedom so provided in the form of tolerance for internal and external attacks against democracy.
“What we end up with,” wrote Revel, “in what is conventionally called Western society is a topsy-turvy situation in which those seeking to destroy democracy appear to be fighting for legitimate aims, while its defenders are pictured as repressive reactionaries. Identification of democracy’s internal and external adversaries with the forces of progress, legitimacy, even peace, discredits and paralyzes the efforts of people who are only trying to preserve their institutions.”
Yesterday, Escondido Councilmember Waldron told me her surprise is that "People are so willing to trash the sovereignty of our nation, while wrapping themselves in the Constitution, and then discarding it when it no longer meets their needs."
Waldron and Revel are, now and then, ruing the same things, it seems.
In the 1980s, Revel was using Soviet communism and its apologists in the United States as principle examples. He could have just as easily been writing about Osama bin Laden and those of us so quick to forget the people who died the morning of September 11, 2001.
In fact, he could have just as easily been writing about those so quick to ignore the difference between legal and illegal in Escondido or National City, California.
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Written by Barry Jantz