Enforcing the Law
We have vehicle speed laws for a variety of reasons…chief among them is safety of individuals. So you can only drive so fast without violating the law. You may not agree with the law, but you have to follow it and police have to enforce it. The system breaks down otherwise.
But you may have a very good reason for violating the speed law. Perhaps you are in a hurry and the law is inconvenient. That’s no excuse, as you may have found when trying to get out of a ticket.
Perhaps the speed limit where you are is different than in other places. Just because something is legal elsewhere doesn’t make it legal where you are at the moment.
I think we’d all agree on everything I’ve mentioned so far. Let’s see if we can push the point.
Arizona has a law banning abortions after 15 weeks. Another law makes it a crime for a doctor to perform an abortion after the time; in other words, committing a crime.
However, Arizona attorney general Kris Mayes said this week she will not enforce the state’s abortion laws. She says that abortion “is not a place for government intervention…prosecutorial resources should not be spent on trying to put doctors in jail.”
This follows action by the state’s governor a few weeks ago, issuing an executive order that centralized the power to enforce abortion laws in the hands of the attorney general…rather than allowing county prosecutors discretion.
What if our governor issued an executive order giving all power regarding enforcement of vehicle speed laws in the hands of the attorney general, who then said she didn’t believe speeding should be a crime so there would no longer be prosecutions…what kind of reaction would that generate?
This is different, you may say…that is speeding, while this is abortion.
I’d agree…and enforcing the law to protect a human life is quite important, whether the topic is speeding or abortion…probably even more so in the latter case.
The bottom line is that without consistent and certain enforcement of laws—any laws—we have no self-governing society. And maybe that is just what some have in mind.
