Court Opinion

ID: 9684981
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 14:20:23.95456+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:18:01.573886
License: Public Domain

GAERTNER, Judge,
concurring.
Domestic tranquility, as envisioned by the authors of the Constitution of the United States, cannot be maintained if the courts, which exist for the purpose of maintaining order in our society, can be defied with impunity. Therefore, the only issues to which this court may address its attention in this matter are the effect upon an ordered society and the necessary legal consequences of open, notorious and repeated defiance of judicial authority. We look not to the morality or immorality of abortions, nor to the motivation, even though it may arise to the level of a moral imperative, of the petitioners. Defiance of court orders cannot be overlooked or disregarded without a concomitant erosion of social order leading to eventual anarchy. The disavowal by petitioners herein of intent to demonstrate contempt for the court’s order must be viewed in the context of the potential effects of their actions upon the preservation of harmony in a society governed by the rule of law.
Civil disobedience is recognized by some moralists and theologians as a concept which would morally, although not legally, justify conduct, non-injurious to the rights of others, in violation of existing civil law for the purpose of creating such a surge of public opinion as to cause a change in the law. Inherent in this concept are two preconditions of which petitioners herein should be aware — first, the exhaustion of all possibility of effecting a change in law through lawful, political means; second, a willingness to accept the legal consequences of one’s actions. Indeed, some practitioners of civil disobedience have viewed these consequences — imprisonment and even, in historic times, execution — as a means of focusing public attention upon the justness of their cause.
We are blessed in this nation because the right to persuade others of the rightness of our ideas is virtually unfettered. The right to impose them is not. Nor do we possess rights to intrude upon the practice by others of what they believe. And lest this permitted diversity lead to chaos, the rule of law as enunciated by the courts must always be obeyed.
I concur.