Pussy Riot And The Rule By Law

So, sacrilege is now a crime in Russia? Russia has adopted Canon Law all of a sudden? A few cute girls attempting music in a church is now an affront to all Russian people? Failure to observe Russian Orthodox norms of behavior, such as dipping one’s fingers very gently in the Holy Water Font and then making the sign of the cross very slowly, is now punishable by the secular government by years of incarceration? These are interesting questions. Things have changed I guess, sacrilege in Russia used to be making fun of Uncle Joe’s mustache.

That Holy Water faux pas came up at the trial, by the way. The girls had been observed by some devout witnesses at the church splashing the Holy Water and making a fast, cursory sign of the cross. Blasphemy!

We’re considering now, many of us around the world, the difference between the rule of law and the quite different Rule By Law. The rule of law is to be desired, it’s a wonderful thing to have the law to protect us, we all agree that killings, armed robberies and theft in general are behaviors that should be discouraged.

Rule By Law happens when the law is employed by the ruling elite of a country to twist the law to its own purposes, as in the Pussy Riot scenario.

The rule of law is better. The application of legal sanctions should apply to all people equally, and the law should protect all people equally. Some governments, including the current Russian government evidently, prefer to use the law as a club to fight off their opponents, or keep certain groups on the run and down. Rule By Law can be no law at all, enabling political piracy.

It is not only authoritarian countries that find comfort in the Rule By Law. Any country that is merely overly status conscious will achieve the same result by offering different results to people from different income/achievement demographics.

My own miserable country is not entirely innocent in all of this. Check out the statistics for incarceration by race in America, for instance. Long ago a Hispanic friend of mine did a two-to-five in New York. I visited him up at the prison, and he explained to me that it was common knowledge that for the same crime, on the same facts, with the same evidence, a Black defendant would have gotten five-to-seven and a White defendant would have gotten off. Statistics bear this out. “Keeping certain groups down” indeed.

Needs work, this whole “justice is blind” thing.

As usual, this being a blog, I leave the hard work to you.