Good Intentions Aren't Enough

It's about priorities

American leftists often boast of their superior compassion for humanity, but there is something peculiar about that compassion: it is often accompanied by derision for those closest to them. If you’ve been on social media over the past few years, you’ve surely seen this chart, which was originally a scientific study but has now become a meme:

Technically, the study found that self-identified liberals claimed to care for everything, including animals, plants, and even rocks, while conservatives only cared for their family and friends. However, in practice, it’s clear that many leftists care more for people and things that are further removed from their own lives, often at the expense of those closest to them.

Consider how leftists vociferously support mentally ill men who want the world to pretend they are women rather than the real women who are forced to share bathrooms and locker rooms with them. Or how they destroyed the livelihoods of farmers to save a fish or gutted the logging industry to save an owl. Consider the constant calls for clemency and mercy for evil murderers with no thought to the families of the victims whose lives they took in cold blood.

Nearly two centuries ago, Charles Dickens published the novel Bleak House, which depicted a dispute over a will. One of his characters, Mrs. Jellyby, is a “telescopic philanthropist” who spends every waking hour and every resource on a project in Africa while severely neglecting her husband and children. Even when the project fails, as Dickens notes in his postscript, Jellyby immediately finds a new cause to occupy her time.

This is the sort of cheap compassion we see over and over in American society. The same people who told us during last year’s presidential campaign that American towns must open their doors and their wallets to tens of thousands of Haitian migrants sneer at rural American communities that have been gutted by outsourcing and drug addiction. Leftists seem to have a pathological hatred of their own countrymen, yet pat themselves on the back for the compassion they show to foreigners.

When the White House Twitter account posted an image of a crying woman who had been arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), leftists called it cruel, mean, and even fascist. The fact that the woman in question was not only an illegal alien who had reentered our country after being deported but was also a fentanyl dealer didn’t matter. Where is the compassion for the hundreds of thousands of Americans who die each year from fentanyl?

Earlier this week, Gov. Brad Little signed Senate Bill 1141, which prohibits camping on sidewalks or in public parks. The purpose of this bill is to prevent cities in Idaho, such as Boise, from going down the road of Seattle, Portland, or San Francisco and becoming overrun by homeless encampments. These encampments are public nuisances, bringing disorder, drugs, and crime to our downtown areas. Not only that, but they are also dangerous for the homeless people themselves, far more so than the many shelters available for those in need.

Image credit Seattle Times

Mayor Lauren McLean of Boise denounced S1141 on Facebook yesterday:

Notice a few things:

• Mayor McLean does not explain what S1141 actually does. She implied that it removes the ability of local police to help homeless people, which is completely false. If you’re a Boise resident whose only information came from your mayor’s post, you would not know the truth. Sen. Dan Foreman, a former police officer, explained in his debate on S1141 last month how it would still allow discretion for law enforcement personnel.

• The mayor refers to it three times as “the Galloway law.” Sen. Codi Galloway took back a state Senate seat in west Boise, which surely irritates and even scares Democrats like McLean. She is associating Galloway’s name with something negative, hoping Boise voters will respond to that stimulus in the next election. She also dropped the name of Attorney General Raúl Labrador, adding an additional negative association for her Democratic voters.

• Finally, the mayor boasts about how much she cares for homeless people. She implies that S1141 comes from a place of cruelty rather than acknowledging that it is about protecting both the community and homeless individuals. During the Senate debate, Galloway related a story of children who died in a fire caused by attempting to use a camp stove in a vehicle. Shelters are much safer than sidewalks and parks, yet for some reason, Mayor McLean does not seem enthusiastic about promoting organizations such as the Boise Rescue Mission, which has a Christian mission and worldview.

Leftist approaches to solving homelessness often seem to involve spending a lot of money for little tangible benefit. However, those who lead the NGOs that receive taxpayer money seem to make out just fine. In Minnesota, for example, a food bank CEO was making nearly three-quarters of a million dollars, one of ten employees earning more than $150,000 per year.

If homelessness disappeared overnight, NGOs like that would be out of work. I suspect that, like Mrs. Jellyby, they would quickly find a new cause to justify their existence.

What does true compassion look like? It is private charity, not taxpayer-funded bureaucracy. It is putting the needs of your own community first rather than sacrificing them for a faraway ideal. Last year, I republished an editorial from Codi Galloway in which she reflected on Boise’s decline, from a city where young families could afford homes and enjoy safety and prosperity to one that is headed down the same road as Portland and Seattle:

Safe communities are a priority for families and economies to thrive. My grandpa was the sheriff of Boise. I grew up with a love and respect for the institutions that keep us safe. I’m afraid the City of Boise has lost their way. Instead of focusing on building a safe community, our leadership has chosen to focus on demilitarizing the police, encouraging the homeless to camp in our streets, and making Boise a sanctuary welcoming city to non citizens. Boise is no longer the family-friendly city it used to be.

Good intentions are not enough. Vague pronouncements of compassion that allow danger and lawlessness to flourish are not enough. When leftists like Mayor McLean propose supposedly compassionate ideas to solve social problems, we can look at other places that have tried the same policies and see the results.

A few years ago, KOMO TV in Seattle aired a documentary about how lax enforcement of laws against public camping, drug abuse, and other problems associated with homelessness was killing a once-great city:

We don’t have to go down that road. We can keep Idaho a safe place for growing families by correctly ordering our compassion. Vice President J.D. Vance drew criticism from the left earlier this year when he invoked a Christian doctrine called ordo amoris in an interview with Fox News:

As an American leader, but also just as an American citizen, your compassion belongs first to your fellow citizens. That doesn’t mean you hate people from outside of your own borders, but there’s this old-school [concept]—and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way—that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then, after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.

This concept was elucidated by St. Augustine more than 1,500 years ago in On Christian Doctrine:

Now he is a man of just and holy life who forms an unprejudiced estimate of things, and keeps his affections also under strict control, so that he neither loves what he ought not to love, nor fails to love what he ought to love, nor loves that more which ought to be loved less, nor loves that equally which ought to be loved either less or more, nor loves that less or more which ought to be loved equally.

St. Thomas Aquinas built upon that idea in Summa Theologiae, arguing that Christ’s command to love God with all our hearts and to love our neighbor as ourselves sets out the proper order of our attention.

Having said all that, compare the approaches of Mayor McLean and Sen. Galloway to the same problem. The Boise mayor believes the compassionate approach is to continue spending more money while actively not enforcing laws designed to keep the community safe. Galloway, on the other hand, recognizes that solving societal problems like homelessness requires policy that encourages family formation while upholding the rule of law.

If your loves are not properly aligned, you risk becoming a Mrs. Jellyby: sacrificing your family and community for an abstract idea of helping others. Policy must follow this correct order, placing the needs of citizens before guests and the law-abiding before criminals. This is not cruelty, but compassion as properly defined.

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Please take a moment to thank our sponsors: Lynn Bradescu’s Keller Williams Realty, Money Metals Exchange, and the Syringa Speaker Series. The Syringa Speaker Series will be raising money at its upcoming event to support the Boise Rescue Mission, which is exactly the kind of rightly ordered charity that we need.