-Caveat Lector-
THE FANATICISM OF LINDA CHAVEZ
By Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
January 11, 2001
Linda Chavez has only herself to blame
for the fact that she won't be the next
secretary of labor. Frankly, she should
have known better.
She should have known better than to
open her heart to a stranger in need. Let
alone a stranger who had just spent 10
days in a shelter for battered women. Let
alone a battered woman who couldn't speak
English,had very little money, and was
fleeing a country racked by civil war and
political murder.
What was Chavez thinking? Was she out
of her right-wing mind? How could she and
her husband have allowed Marta Mercado to
share their home while trying to get her
life in order and obtain a green card?
How could she have driven Mercado to
English classes? Or showed her how to get
around on the subway? Or occasionally
given her -- of all things! --
spending money? She must have been
deranged to think she could extend
such compassion to another person and get
away with it.
Anyone who's been around Washington as
long as Chavez has knows that people who
aspire to government power and influence
don't do such things.
You think Senator Ted Kennedy, who lost no
time calling Chavez's extraordinary
generosity "a very troubling new
allegation," would let a homeless Central
American refugee move in with *his*
family? You think John J. Sweeney, the
AFL-CIO boss who declared war on Chavez and
pronounced her relationship with Mercado
"really unfortunate," is going to drive
some battered woman with no green card to
her English classes?
Oh, no. Nosiree. It's all well and
good to talk about helping the vulnerable
and being kind to strangers and the-
greatest-of-these-is-charity. But to
actually live that way? To respond to the
misfortune of another human being with
genuine self-sacrifice? To show concern
for the poor by reaching into your *own*
pocket?
Real Washington players know that only
a fanatic behaves like that. And that was
just the point that Kennedy and Sweeney --
and People for the American Way's Ralph
Neas and the National Council of La Raza
and all those other leftist mouthpieces
that joined in assailing Chavez -- were
trying to make about her all along: She's
a fanatic.
And she persists in her fanaticism!
"Knowing everything that has happened over
the last week," she said at her press
conference on Tuesday, "if that woman
showed up at my door, if I was asked . . .
to do that again, I would do it in an
instant, without hesitation."
She probably would. She and her
husband have a history of bending over
backward to help immigrants and others in
difficulty. They opened their home to the
Bui brothers, refugees from Vietnam. They
paid for private school for the children
of Ada Iturrino, a single mother from
Puerto Rico. They aided Margarita
Valladares in becoming a citizen and
getting her first job. "They are a family
who help anybody, no matter who the person
is," Valladares said Tuesday afternoon.
"No matter what the problem, they are
always there."
And to think such a woman almost
became secretary of labor.
Would-be future Cabinet secretaries,
you're on notice: If you meet an
undocumented immigrant whose life is a
shambles, don't do what Chavez did.
Call the Immigration and Naturalization
Service instead. Get that foreigner
deported. After all, "harboring an
illegal alien" -- as the New York Times
lectured in its editorial cheering
Chavez's fall -- "is a felony."
So stifle any urge you may feel to do
the decent thing. Remember: It isn't your
job to help the luckless and forlorn.
It's the federal government's job. That's
why we have those Cabinet departments in
the first place. What kind of society
would we be if ordinary men and women
started going out of their way to take
care of each other without waiting
for Senator Kennedy to introduce a bill
making it legal?
And let's hope there will be no more
flouting of the immigration laws in the
name of a higher moral code. At her press
conference Chavez said, "I don't check
green cards when I see a woman who is
battered and who has no place to live and
nothing to eat." Man, this extremist just
doesn't get it: In America we *do* check
green cards, thanks to the Immigration
Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) and
the harsh sanctions it imposes on anyone
caught employing an illegal immigrant.
That law isn't on Washington's radar
screen anymore, but not long ago you could
have heard some of the very voices that
this week denounced Chavez denounce with
equal passion the cruel provisions of the
law she is accused of skirting. Kennedy
called them "inherently unfair" and
introduced a bill to repeal them. Neas
found them "morally unacceptable."
La Raza said they were "intolerable."
They were right. IRCA is a shameful
law. It punishes Americans for giving
immigrants jobs that other Americans don't
want. It fosters discrimination against
job-seekers whose dark skin or Hispanic
names seem "foreign." It makes federal
agents pursue scared immigrant workers who
are harming no one.
It's the sort of law, in other words,
that an ethical, thoughtful person might
feel compelled to violate in an exigent
case. But if Linda Chavez wants to live
and ethical and thoughtful life, why on
earth did she ever come to Washington?
----
If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey
it, he is obligated to do so. - Thomas Jefferson
If it [a law] is of such a nature that it requires you
to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say,
break the law. - Henry David Thoreau
If you have ten thousand regulations, you destroy all
respect for the law. - Winston Churchill
In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of
sheep one must, above all be a sheep. --Albert Einstein
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