Obey laws as they exist today                     

Five people snuck into a movie theater. Should staff kick them out, or welcome them to remain and enjoy the movie?

Democrats insist non-citizens who've invaded our country be allowed to "remain and enjoy the movie."

They advocate that illegal aliens be allowed to cast ballots in our elections, sit on juries, even serve in elected office. That prompts this question: What rights should America's legal citizens have in our own country, that non-citizens shouldn't?

Americans need to think carefully about this. It affects our entire nation - its job opportunities, social, medical, and educational services' sustainability, cultural and legal integrity.

We should ask ourselves: What's the significance of citizenship?

Advocates of granting legal citizenship to illegals sometimes argue that such has become their rightful due, as illegals may have lived for years in the United States.

Consider the principle of legal ownership status in another context:

Five years ago, Roy stole a blue car in Philadelphia. Today, he is still driving it. Because five years have passed, is the car now legitimately Roy's, or does it remain stolen property?

Voices demanding that citizenship be extended to scofflaw non-citizens insist that illegals who were brought into this country when they were children are without culpability, as they know no other life, no other country. Advocates also point to possible past economic contributions. 

Consider, then, another hypothetical: 

After having stolen the blue Philadelphia car, Roy gives it to Pete. Though initially unaware that Roy had stolen it, Pete does later realize that. It is the only car Pete has ever had. And over the course of several years of driving it and enjoying its benefits, Pete spent considerable cash on gas, oil, and general mechanical upkeep.

Do those factors make the car no longer the bounty of criminality, and somehow Pete's rightful property? 

Of course not.

Some might object to that comparison, and argue citizenship is not a material commodity. But all rights are properties. The freedoms of religion and association cannot be taken off the shelf, physical elements examined. Yet they have value.

In the same way, legal citizenship status is a good. 

One might think a current law broken, and at some future point likely to be changed. But that doesn’t justify ignoring its present actuality. No society can survive as an orderly institution if everyone picks which laws to respect and which to disregard.

People today should obey laws that exist today.

Democrats devoted to wrongs

The ugly, strategized destruction of American liberty, pursued by woke Democrats who favor grim statism masked by utopian claptrappery, has several manifestations.

Hostility toward our Lord and Savior is one.

As related by Breitbart: “On Monday’s broadcast of CNN’s ‘OutFront,’ Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison (D) defended people barging into a church in St. Paul as ‘First Amendment activity.’”

In the words of Motormouth Maybelle: “Ooh, Papa Tooney — we got a looney!”

Here’s the entire First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievences.”

Crucial in that passage, for purposes of moment, are the words “free exercise” of religious faith and “peaceably to assemble.” One isn’t likely to hear those words frequently from Ellison, Walz, or Frey. But you did just hear them from America’s founders.

True, the Bill of Rights’ protection of religious exercise specifies governmental, and not private actions. But local and state legal safeguards barring all invasive impedings of others’ faiths, apply.

So does the integrity of private property. The Constutution doesn’t accord anyone the right to storm into Keith Ellison’s home at 2:47 AM, and bellow Meredith Wilson’s “76 Trombones.”

Like homes, churches are private facilities. They are not roadways outside Home Depot. Though laws at various levels recognize that, and afford churches proper protection, such statutes are as nothing to self-righteous gadflys.

(CatholicVote sent an email to supporters, following the church desecration: “The word ‘peaceably’ in no way applies to the behavior of the mob that descended on this church. This was no protest, it was an act of intimidation perpetrated on a congregation that included the elderly and families with young children.”)

I certainly make no claims to blemishlessness. (No believer does.) But the antipathy toward Christianity woke miscreants brandish is revolting. And it hardly seethes, alone. It is joined in stomach-turning anti-American stew by other poisonous ingredients.

For instance, fever to squelch contrary expression.

One reads constantly of oppressive rabble that blow whistles, bang on sauce pots, and sound air horns to obfuscate opposing speech. Ironically, perpetrators of such clampdown manueverings never fail to shriek “First Amendment” when their own words are endangered. Exploiting a society’s own laws against it is standard deviltry for subversives.

It is common to see (possibly paid) protesters stiff-arming inquisitive reporters and observers. Rather than engaging in substantive conversations with outsiders, and making such cases as they can for their perspectives, many heed self-appointed overseers’ “Don’t feed the trolls!” admonitions, and clench jaws.

But citizens should debate topics of the day. Doing so is vital to the health of our democratic republic, as is respecting others’ rights to expressionary liberty.

Through unhampered dialogue, opinions may be gauged for validity by both speakers and listeners.

The refusal to exchange ideas, and the ambition to crush contrary messages — even through violence — are best suited to failed socialist states, not open and free democratic republics.

“Lawfare” is another wielded wickedness.

“Under this DOJ, wrongdoing has nothing to do with whether they’re going to focus [on] or investigate you,” Ellison effectively sobbed, to CNN’s “OutFront” host Erin Burnett.

Ahem. The Minnesota AG, who is alleged to be lobes-deep in the state’s wildly exorbitant daycare fraud operation, seems possessed of a faulty memory. (That’s charitable speculation.)

Unacknowledged by the dodgy paper-chaser were Biden Democrats’ documented skullduggery. Prior to the last White House competition, tactical cases against Trump allies were conjured like rabbits from top hats. Shady machinations were undertaken to imprison for life fading Joe’s leading electoral opponent, the patriot currently behind the Resolute Desk.

Also at the national level was a Jan. 6 investigative congressional panel. Tellingly excluded were pro-Trump representatives. Panelists subsequently destroyed exculpatory evidence.

Playing their own dirty roles were state officials who schemed to deny political liberty to citizens, by booting Trump from ballots.

None of the above — mobs clashing against innocent Christian worshippers, clownish crazies stomping on speakers’ windpipes, or bureaucrats plotting the ‘taking out’ of electoral adversaries — have anything to do with the noble ideals upon which our country was birthed.

Democrats are devoted to the wrong things. And they don’t care.

Waterloo’s DC Larson is the author of That a Man Can Again Stand Up and Ideas Afoot. He counts among freelance credits the Daily Caller, American Thinker, Iowa Standard, and numerous heartland papers. His political blog is American Scene Magazine.