“Extreme Vetting”

A reader of my blog declared his support this morning for Mr. Donald J. Trump’s proposal of “extreme vetting” for immigrants.  I couldn’t help but think, with that in mind, of a funny four-and-a-half-minute video that one of my sons recently shared with me:

“Putting Donald Trump Supporters Through an Ideology Test”

Now, I’m in favor of carefully screening potential immigrants in an attempt to block the entry of terrorists.  And I realize that there’s something uncharitable and wrong (and unquestionably elitist) about laughing as somebody who is obviously brighter and better educated toys with people of a different social, educational, and economic class who plainly aren’t getting the joke.

But I think it really needs to be said that, as usual with Trumpism, what Mr. Trump seems to be talking about (and what some of his supporters seem to be endorsing) is poorly thought-out and  frighteningly vague.  Not to mention the fact that screening immigrants simply on the basis of their religious views is profoundly unconstitutional.  (In the nineteenth century, the federal government of the United States very nearly enacted restrictions on Mormon immigration, which would have excluded European converts purely because of their religious affiliation.)

And so, as I’ve done once or twice before, I share a passage that I love from a play and a film that I love, Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, centered on Sir Thomas More:

Alice More: Arrest him!

More: Why, what has he done?

Margaret More: He’s bad!

More: There is no law against that.

Will Roper: There is! God’s law!

More: Then God can arrest him.

Alice: While you talk, he’s gone!

More: And go he should, if he was the Devil himself, until he broke the law!

Roper: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law!

More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

Roper: I’d cut down every law in England to do that!

More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast– man’s laws, not God’s– and if you cut them down—and you’re just the man to do it—do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law for my own safety’s sake.

Now, I realize that the historical Sir Thomas — who, exactly four centuries after his execution by Henry VIII in 1535, became St. Thomas — was quite a bit more . . .  umm, complex than the play and the film let on.  I recently stood again in London where he was executed, and I’m sorry to say that he wasn’t an entirely guiltless victim of the violence of the period; he had inflicted more than his share of it himself.  But the words that Robert Bolt placed on his lips remain, in my view, essential and profound.