Illinois’s recent assault weapons ban has provoked more than a little consternation across the state—as it should. The ban, signed into law by Governor JB Pritzker on January 10th of this year, immediately banned the sale of “assault weapons” and magazines with a capacity greater than ten rounds. The ban also requires current firearm owners to register their now-illegal weapons with the Illinois State Police. There’s only one problem for Pritzker: The vast majority of Sheriffs in are not on board.

So far, 90 out of 102 Illinois counties’ sheriffs have stated that they will not be enforcing the ban and will not require residents to register their weapons and magazines. It’s certainly gratifying to see that Illinois might just have some Constitutional spirit left, but as Christians, we ought to consider the legitimacy of such resistance. May sheriffs (and citizens) disobey Pritzker’s assault weapons ban? The relevant passage of Scripture here is, of course, Romans 13:

Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God. Therefore whoever resists the authority resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will bring judgment on themselves. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to evil.  (Rom. 13:1-3)

The Apostle Paul’s reasoning is clear: the ruling authorities are divinely appointed by God; therefore, to resist the ruling authorities is to resist God.

It appears that Illinois sheriffs who are defying the assault weapons ban are disobeying Scripture, does it not? Not so fast. Who is really resisting the higher powers here, the sheriffs or J.B. Pritzker? The highest law of the land—the United States Constitution—states that the people’s right to keep and bear arms may not be infringed. Governor Pritzker, by signing the assault weapons ban into law, is himself in high-handed disobedience against the Constitution. In other words, Pritzker is the one who’s actually disobeying Paul’s injunction in Romans 13. Those sheriffs defying the governor’s mandate are, in fact, upholding the law; the sheriffs are the ones truly acting in subjection to the higher powers.

What about citizens, then? Must owners of “assault weapons” and “high-capacity magazines” register their banned firearms anyway? The same logic applies: obey the Constitution. There is, however, an additional assurance—citizens are obeying their sheriffs. Local authorities who rightly defy Pritzker’s unlawful bill give the residents of their county an avenue to submit themselves to the higher powers (the sheriffs) so they don’t have to comply with unlawful injunctions from the state government. In other words, rejection of Pritzker’s unlawful legislation does not result in anarchy—citizens may (and should) still in good conscience obey their local authorities.

Historically, this was known as the doctrine of the lesser magistrate. When a ruler overreaches his divinely-appointed sphere of authority, lesser magistrates (like sheriffs and mayors) may interpose themselves between the citizen and the ruler, both protecting the citizens and giving them a lawful authority who may be obeyed. John Calvin puts it thus:

[P]opular magistrates have been appointed to curb the tyranny of kings . . . So far am I from forbidding these officially to check the undue license of kings, that if they connive at kings when they tyrannize and insult over the humbler of the people, I affirm that their dissimulation is not free from nefarious perfidy, because they fraudulently betray the liberty of the people, while knowing that, by the ordinance of God, they are its appointed guardians. (Institutes of the Christian Religion, Bk. IV.31)

Illinois citizens and law enforcement officers ought to take comfort in this doctrine. Law enforcement officers are no less appointed by God than Gov. Pritzker and, as Calvin says, perform an important role as the appointed guardians of the liberty of the people. They must courageously defend that liberty, interposing themselves between the state government and Illinois citizens. Citizens likewise may rest assured that they are not agents of anarchy when they disobey the assault weapons ban. On the contrary, they are simply obeying their God-appointed lesser magistrates—law enforcement officers.

Many government officials and progressives in Illinois like to tout the state as being a leader in championing women’s rights. In April 2020, a report in the Chicago Tribune showed a shocking backlog of rape kits waiting to be tested by the Illinois State Police (ISP). Women across the state have suffered for years waiting for the DNA of their attackers to be tested in hopes of having their cases solved and their violators brought to justice. Since that report brought the problem to the public’s attention, the ISP has made progress, but there are many kits still to be tested with more rape crimes adding to that number.

Applying ISP data from the end of March, Tribune reported 7,009 kits were waiting in line to be tested, with a processing time of 247 days. The wait time had grown from 194 days in February due to reduced staffing to meet social-distancing guidelines caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

How did we get here?

The story begins in 2002, when the backlog was at close to 3,000 kits. The General Assembly tasked the Illinois State Police with the distribution, collection, analysis, and maintenance of rape kits through the passage of the Sexual Assault Evidence Collection Program (SB 3095). It wasn’t until 2003 that lawmakers added the cost of the program into the ISP’s budget. 

In 2010, the Assembly enacted SB 3296, a rape kit reform bill, requiring law enforcement agencies to submit any sexual assault evidence it receives within 10 business days of receipt to the Department of State Police. The bill further stated the evidence should be analyzed within six months “after receipt of all necessary evidence and standards by the State Police Laboratory or other designated laboratory if sufficient staffing and resources are available.” It also included a one-time statewide performance audit.

The Accountability Project performed a voluntary audit of the Champaign, Chicago, Springfield, and Urbana police departments in 2015, which failed to receive a response from the Chicago Police Department, and inadequate submission rates from the other cities. In 2016, The Chicago Sun-Times reported a backlog of 2,179 of kits. In response, the General Assembly enacted another law, SB 2221, that would require annual audits of rape kit submissions in an effort to increase accountability. That same year, survivors were given access to the status of their rape kits through SB3096.

Subsequent laws were passed in 2017, 2018, and 2019 to provide greater rights to survivors of sexual assault including providing them with advocates, counseling options, and increasing the number of medical professionals trained to perform patient exams. These included the assignment of the ISP with creating and maintaining a statewide sexual assault evidence kit tracking system accessible to survivors. Legally, the system was to be in place by August 16, 2020, but as with many things, the pandemic happened.

For a complete list of the bills, visit the End The Backlog website.

Where things stand now

In late September, the ISP announced its new online database of sexual abuse survivors, Checkpoint. The database allows sexual assault survivors to track their case evidence. There is, however, a hitch: the database starts with cases from August 14 of this year. No cases prior to that date are included in the database. In addition, 14% of the state’s hospitals have yet to sign on to using the new system.

The April article in the Chicago Tribune did much to raise public consciousness and pressure the ISP, as did the looming August legal deadline. In a September 2, 2020 update, the Tribune reported the ISP had reduced the backlog by 31% to 5,811 by July 31. The average turnaround time had gone down from 247 days in March to 210 in August. The article attributed the reduction to “a new computer system, using robots to extract DNA and outsourcing cases to be processed elsewhere.”

While this all sounds like good news, the Chicago Justice Project (CJP) says not so fast. On November 16, it released a report stating the number of backlogged cases has actually increased by 46% at the Chicago Forensic Laboratory testing site.

Among the reasons for its findings, the CJP report cites definitions and interpretations: “The ISP now defines backlog as any unfinished assignment (i.e., work requested on a case) in a section, regardless of when it was submitted. In previous years, the backlog was defined as unfinished cases (in-progress or un-started) in the section for more than 30 days.” Additionally, discrepancies in testing DNA biology and forensic biology caused further confusion. The report issued suggestions to the Chicago lab and ISP for cutting the backlog and improving transparency.

Last year, Governor J.B. Pritzker appointed a Forensic Science Task Force, which issued a report in July. The task force suggested the appointment of a permanent commission and more funding, along with further training, better procurement, and increased communication.

For nearly 20 years, elected officials and other government leaders have worked to resolve this issue of justice. Instead, while trying to correct and improve previous laws, they seem only to have created a more complicated morass of laws. Politicians’ endless law-making has created what must feel to survivors like an unending circle that needs to be broken.

While society has grown more understanding and aware, and the options and treatment for survivors have greatly increased, the need to end the backlog and bring justice to survivors continues. It is hoped that our leaders would quit making laws and announcing edicts but would instead allocate resources that would enable personnel to move quickly to bring justice for survivors.

Last week ten lawmakers from the Jewish Caucus in Springfield sponsored a resolution condemning Illinois Family Action (IFA) and Illinois Family Institute (IFI) for engaging in what they call “hate speech,” because IFA compared the abortion holocaust to the Jewish Holocaust. Titled “Illinois Family Action-Hate Speech” (HJR 55), the resolution uses subjective hyperbole, disreputable sources and unreasonable inferences that make the alleged offense seem overtly sinister.

If you want an exhaustive, well-argued refutation of the resolution, read “Left-Wing Partisans File Stunning Resolution Against Illinois Family.” HJR 55 is stunning for all the reasons that author Laurie Higgins identifies but also because of its glaring omission: any mention of abortion, the topic of the article that started it all.

There are always hazards when invoking the Holocaust, not least of which is overstating the parallel to a current situation. But that’s not the case here. It is indisputable that the Nazis dehumanized an entire class of human beings defined solely by their ethnoreligious heritage, then rounded them up and shipped them off to be exterminated with lethal efficiency in death camps across Europe.

It’s also indisputable that abortion providers—most notably Planned Parenthood—are also in the extermination business. They and their enablers—most notably regressive Democrats, who increasingly champion infanticide—have dehumanized an entire class of human beings defined solely by their stage of development in situ.

One significant difference between the Jewish Holocaust and our modern holocaust is that abortion clinics don’t have to round up babies and send them to a centralized abortion mill. Instead, Planned Parenthood has conveniently dotted the country with more than 600 of their own little death camps for easy access. It’s the children’s own mothers who—whether they gleefully “shout their abortion” or enter a clinic in desperation—play the role of Hitler’s Schutzstaffel.

The parallels between the two holocausts, made so often as to be in danger of becoming cliché, are strong and obvious—except to the willfully blind.

So why the extraordinary step of a resolution in the Illinois House condemning the comparison? Just this: by making the comparison, Illinois Family conferred personhood on the pro-choicers’ blob of tissue. IFI re-humanized them. The resolution’s assertion that IFI is “recklessly comparing those who disagree with their extreme agenda to Nazis” can only be true if babies aren’t human.

The resolution is a naked halogen bulb blinding observers to their real objective, which is to intimidate and shame IFI into submission. Accusations of unspecified threats, anti-Semitism, “hate speech,” “bigotry,” “homophobia” and “extreme rhetoric” are followed by a call for “a formal investigation” into such speech and asking the Secretary of State to suspend IFI’s lobbying credentials.

One of the resolution’s co-sponsors, State Representative Jonathan Carroll (D-Northbrook), took to Twitter to express his outrage. “This is hate speech and I demand a retraction. Comparing Democrats to Nazis to to [sic] promote your agenda is disgraceful.” He was later quoted as saying, “We call on the Illinois State Police to do a full investigation of these incidents.”

To summarize: the all-Democrat Jewish Caucus of the Illinois House of Representatives has circled the wagons and called for reinforcements because they don’t like a commonly-used analogy comparing the killing of 61,000,000 babies (and counting) to the killing of 6,000,000 Jews—and allegedly fear that they will now be the victims of violence. To address the threat, they are summoning the power of the state to crush IFI.

How very Hitler-esque.

Meanwhile, the State of Illinois is circling the drain. We are the least fiscally solvent state, but pay the highest state and local taxes in the country; we are the third most corrupt state in the nation and boast the worst-in-nation pension crisis; we’re unlikely to successfully weather a recession, we have one of the worst home foreclosure rates in the nation, and we lead the country in number of residents fleeing the state.

If regressives get their way, they’ll also bestow on Illinois the distinction of having the most radical abortion laws in the land. (We’re number one! We’re number one!)

Instead of wasting their time and taxpayer money weaponizing the state to kick around a tiny pro-family organization that enjoys First Amendment protections, how about getting busy fixing the national embarrassment that the land of Lincoln has become?

Instead of indoctrinating five freshman legislators on the finer points of virtue signaling (“Hate has no home here,” right, Rep. Sara Feigenholtz?), how about challenging Jonathan Carroll, Daniel Didech, Jennifer Gong-Gershowitz, Yehiel Kalish, Karina Villa, Anna Moeller and Bob Morgan to balance a budget by reining in spending? Instead of demonstrating knee jerk outrage, how about demanding an investigation into how the most corrupt big city in the nation let Jussie “O.J.” Smollett skate after slandering half the country’s citizens and lying about it?

Regressives and their junior commies in the Illinois House have more pressing issues to deal with than some petty disagreement about whether legal abortion is like the Jewish Holocaust or not. Judging by the March 20 turnout to protest the proposed abortion legislation that “overtaxed Capitol security,” there are a lot of people who agree that it is.

The Hebrew prophet Isaiah wrote, “Woe to those who call good evil and evil good, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter” (Isaiah 5:20). Jewish legislators should understand better than anyone the evil of taking innocent life. Rescind the resolution and do what you were elected to do: rescue Illinois.

Take ACTION: Click HERE to contact your state senator and representative to ask them to reject this dangerous resolution. Ask them to vote down HJR 55 and the unprecedented and tyrannical action being taken by extreme partisans in the Illinois General Assembly.

Read more:

Left-Wing Partisans File Stunning Resolution Against Illinois Family (Laurie Higgins)

Truth and Love or Hate? (Rev. Calvin Lindstrom)

SPOTLIGHT: Illinois’ Abortion Holocaust (Podcast)

A bold voice for pro-family values in Illinois!

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