LEGAL AND MORAL.
29 years ago, at school, I remember doing Driver Education as a weekly subject for six months. It was a good initiative, as many of us were to be obtaining our licences the following year, or, in my case, the year after that. In one lesson, we studied defensive driving and examined a case where a driver ran into the back of the car in front and the question posed to us was, the driver of the car in front was in the right legally, but was he right morally? He was looking out for an address and had almost driven past it, when he jammed on the brakes. While it's true that the car behind may have been following too closely, we were told that the way to prevent some such accidents was, if you're driving the car in front, and you're approaching the address, slow up beforehand. Say, for example, you want Number 20, look at the street and think, "Okay, here's Number 14, so slow up and put your indicator on, and give the driver behind an indication that you'll be pulling over soon."
Likewise, if one watches the underarm ball incident of 1981, between Australia and New Zealand, one can see that Geoffrey Howarth, the New Zealand cricket captain was unhappy as he had been playing English County Cricket, and such a move was illegal, yet it was permissible in One Day International cricket, even though it was unsporting.
Extremists are known for cherry-picking the worst instances, such as the font of all right-wing nonsense in Australia, hanson, claiming that multiculturalism was a failure and highlighting Bosnia as an example! To examine the conflict in the Balkans is beyond the scope of this essay, save to say that it is multi-causal. On my side of politics (the left) I have seen memes saying that slavery was legal as was the Holocaust, to which I say, yes, that is true, but we have to be careful that we don't cherry pick extreme examples, either.
Slavery, if we divorce it from feudal serfdom, was immoral and racist in nature. The Holocaust may have been "legal" in Germany, because Hitler and his Nazi Government gradually passed laws that prohibited Jewish people from practising law or medicine, and forbade intermarriage between Jews and Gentiles, and he rounded up Jewish people, but it was a crime against humanity, and one which judges at war crimes trials saw fit to send Nazis to the gallows or before the firing squad, or sentence to lengthy prison terms, as in the case of Albert Speer and Rudolf Hess.
In the past six years, in Australia, we have seen the encroachment of fascism and the passing of immoral laws, such as imprisoning whistleblowers and journalists for talking about conditions in the offshore detention centres. It may not be legal to blow the whistle, but it is immoral to expect people to treat them as being out of sight out of mind. And let us not forget that whether or not the government has the power to decide who can and cannot come to this country, what it should not be able to do is prevent people from raising issues to the public!
The distinction between what is moral and what is legal is not as simple as some may think. If we take prostitution as an example, church groups may condemn prostitution as immoral, but I say the number of clients a sex worker has is personal, provided they are undertaking the work in a clean, licenced venue, they are regularly screened for sexually transmitted infections and are paid fairly determines the morality of it, and the way to make it moral is to safeguard their conditions and to ensure that people trafficking is not occurring. Legality is what is permitted under law and some of what is permitted under law is morally reprehensible.