Parking for the Pious

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"What, did you want us to make him WALK in?"

I have lived near Our Lady of Blackrock Church for a few years now, and throughout that time I’ve been noticing a trend that has aggravated me more and more with each passing week.  There is alternate-side parking on the street on which I live.  It changes over on Thursday at 6:00, and the law is evidently suspended altogether on Sunday morning, during evenings when bingo is being played, and any other time that large numbers of motorists might be attending church.

Now, I’m not an enormously popular guy – and I’ll probably be less so amongst churchgoing folks if they read this post – so I don’t exactly have a caravan of friends and family making camp in front of my apartment day after day.  Nonetheless, my best friend and my brother have each gotten tickets for parking on the wrong side of my street or failing to switch sides at the required time.  The parking enforcement officers weren’t exactly slow to react, either.  Each time someone I know has been ticketed, it’s been as if an officer was lying in wait for someone to mess up.

Yet if I walk down the street on a Sunday morning I find that dozens of motorists flaunt the law on a regular basis, and not one of them has ever had a ticket on his car’s windshield.  It’s simply not possible that the city has routinely failed to notice the multitudes of infractions.  They are deliberately avoiding enforcement of the law at times when it is commonplace for a certain segment of the public to break it.  I don’t know who is responsible for that decision or why they’ve made it, but I know that it is contrary to the spirit and the very purpose of the law.

If laws are selectively enforced they are not laws at all; they are the whims of the people charged with the duty to maintain an orderly society.  If the city feels that alternate-side parking is an excessive burden to my neighborhood in light of how much parking it needs during certain hours, then they should tear down the signs and repeal the rule, or at least modify both to include hours of exemption.  Why should the burden of responsibility be placed upon visitors to my neighborhood, but not upon visitors to its church?

I can imagine what the justifications might be for the current policy of selective ticketing.  Some might think I’m being mean-spirited and asking that congregants be punished for attending church.  But this has nothing to do with religion.  I’m against all double-standards, especially when it’s a matter of the police or other representatives of government permitting the law to be broken with impunity.

Let’s be clear:  They have no idea whether the cars they aren’t ticketing belong to people who are actually attending church.  This unofficial immunity isn’t offered to a specific sort of lawbreaker, but to people who break the law at specific times.  Considering that some of those times are when bingo is scheduled, it can’t even be argued that this non-enforcement is broadly aimed at protecting the pious.  And even if every would-be ticket recipient was fervently praying in the pews and arranging community service projects in the sanctuary at the time they broke the law, the fact remains that they broke the law.

If it’s a sense of piety that motivates law enforcement to grant such amnesty, I wonder if it would provide the same allowances if the building was not a Catholic church but a mosque, or a synagogue, or a Hindu temple.  For that matter, if the law can be suspended around sacred spaces, are the police free to decide for themselves what a sacred space is, or what kind of behavior puts a person above the law?  Can they patrol the area around Ralph Wilson Stadium and give out tickets only to the cars with out of state plates?

If police discretion is acceptable in one circumstance, it’s acceptable in general.  But any bias in enforcement makes the law unintelligible and unfair.  If the law doesn’t justify an equivalent sacrifice from everyone, it isn’t a good law.  If a cop doesn’t hold every citizen to the same standard, he’s not a good cop.

The McMillin Double-Standard

The Huffington Post a few days ago reported on a certain legislative conflict in the Indiana General Assembly. Republican Jud McMillin sponsored a bill to require drug testing of all welfare applicants in the state, leading Democrat Ryan Dvorak to introduce an amendment to levy the same requirement on members of the state legislature. As a result, McMillin temporarily withdrew the bill in order to reword it and try again.

This is a wonderful story, and it illustrates a breaking point I’ve been looking forward to for some time. Society needs to better recognize the responsibilities that holders of government office have to those entitlements that benefit them personally. Anybody who controls access to a good or service for other people should be subject to the most rigorous qualifications for their own access to the same. To structure a system otherwise is to invite conflicts of interest.

It belies his gratitude for the benefits of being on the government payroll if a legislator utilizes his salary, health benefits, and the like, but thinks nothing of limiting unemployment insurance or social security and erecting road blocks to such programs for citizens who rely on government money but can’t take it for granted as a sitting legislator can. It borders on dictatorial if a government official places some sort of burden of proof on his constituents in order that they may access something that he takes casually for himself.

It may seem sensible to place such restrictions on welfare recipients since they do not need to work for their entitlements as legislators have to work for their salaries. But the simple fact is that both groups derive personal benefit from their government, and it is unfairly and irresponsibly presumptuous to expect one and not the other to prove their worthiness, especially when one group is tasked with upholding the very system that feeds them both.

There’s no reason other than pure bigotry to think that poor people are more likely to be on drugs than are those who come from a socio-economic status that puts them close to the halls of power. But even if there was, if drug use ought to bar one’s access to government money, it ought to be a universal standard, and certainly not one from which assemblymen are exempt on the basis that they’re probably not on drugs anyway, so they don’t have to prove it. That would be a shockingly undemocratic double-standard.

If the poor owe it to their country to prove their worthiness for its entitlements, government officials owe it to their country to prove their own worthiness on the basis of the very same standards, and more besides. If your very livelihood is the preservation and improvement of the government that pays your salary and ostensibly serves its constituents’ interests, you should feel the full extent of what that government demands of its citizens. Government servants should never take government for granted, lest they lose sight of what it means to the rest of us.