Having done a good deal of work on John Milton and the Puritan Revolution of 1640, I am familiar with that Pauline doctrine about obeying the Powers that Be, because they are of God.
Both Catholics and Protestants have generally agreed to this principle and based their laws on it.
But both Catholics and Protestants have argued that there are times when an exception can be made. Not if a ruler is somewhat bad. Not if you personally are being treated unjustly. But disobedience and revolt are permitted when a certain line is crossed, when a magistrate cease to be a ruler and becomes an unjust tyrant.
A familiar biblical instance, often cited in history, is King Saul’s replacement by King David. If God gives His support to a magistrate (the usual historical term for kings and other rulers in this context), then God can also withdraw His support. The question is, how do you know that?
It seems to me contradictory for Protestants to argue that this rule can have no exceptions, because how then can they justify Martin Luther’s revolt against the Powers that Were in his time?
Deciding whether matters have gone so far that revolt is justified is, of course, a very difficult and uncomfortable decision. As it happens, the matter has arisen recently in the case of Obama. Would revolt against his tyrannical proclivities be justified? Probably not, unless things go further than they have gone so far, or unless the violence begins from his side.
St. Thomas Aquinas argues, along with many others, that an unjust law need not be obeyed. That doesn’t usually arise in the case of abortion, since the law does not require anyone to have an abortion but rather permits it; but it could arise if, for instance, Obama required Catholic hospitals or doctors to perform abortions against their consciences. That would not require anyone should violate his conscience and kill babies just because Obama, Pelosi, and Reid demanded it. The law would be unjust.
Killing an abortionist is another matter. But I don’t really think that Paul’s doctrine applies in this case. Rather, what applies is the injunction against murder, balanced against the desire to defend innocent babies from future killings by a determined abortionist. America’s laws against murder are, generally, just, and should be obeyed. But Roe v. Wade was a violation of our basic constitutional protection of the right to life, as well as a violation of the Constitutional requirement that the federal government cannot vacate state laws on a whim.
So, what I would say is that the matter is much more complicated than this article suggests. It certainly is not desirable to go around shooting people without legal excuse. But nor is it desirable to stand there smiling and applauding while someone like Tiller does his murderous work.
Suppose the home plate umpire at a ball game calls the first nine pitches "strikes" even though the batter watched motionless as the ball hit the ground en route to the catcher and went nowhere near the plate. With the other team pitching, he then proceeded to call "ball" on a dozen pitches that went right through the strike zone, loading the bases. The laws of baseball say that the home plate umpire's judgment is to be regarded as final, and there would be no legitimate basis for the offended team refusing to play. Nonetheless, I would suggest that at a certain point, for the offended team to refuse to play on would be less of an affront to the integrity of baseball than for them to keep playing.
I agree. God sent Elijah to kill Jezebel's prophets. Apparently he thought offing them was justified. If Scott Roeder felt he was doing God's will, that's up to God to judge his motive, and the action.
This really bothered me:
If a private individual is justified in assassinating Hitler because Hitler is obviously evil and undeserving of the civil magistracy, then would that moral liberty have extended also to someone who was equally convinced that George W. Bush was a usurper of power and a war criminal? I suspect that those who would believe it their moral obligation to fire off a round at Hitler from a crowd, given the opportunity, would have recoiled at the notion of encouraging their angry left-wing neighbors to follow through on their moral convictions and attempt to fell President Bush by whatever violent means seemed most likely to succeed.
The author has a rather awful argument here. Hitler was evil, and an assassin would be acting objectively, based on that fact. OTOH, GWB is not evil, and an assassin would be acting based on his subjective assessment of the man. We could reason that there is moral justification for Hitler's assassination, and at the same time we can justifiably state that someone who would try to assassinate GWB would be either evil or mentally ill.
The whole article is full of bad arguments.