Frank Pavone hates America.

r. Trump’s apol­o­gists insist on the clear lie that his odi­ous rant against The Squad was not racist. He has no such bone. The Squad are four U.S. rep­re­sen­ta­tives who hap­pen to be women of col­or: Alexan­dria Oca­sio-Cortez (D‑NY), Rashi­da Tlaib (D‑MI), Ilhan Omar (D‑MN), and Ayan­na Press­ley (D‑MA); and Mr. Trump told them to “go back” to the “cor­rupt” and “inept” “coun­tries” they came from. (This though three of them were born in the Unit­ed States). But Mr. Trump, his apol­o­gists claim, was not vexed by their race, no sir, but by their so-called hatred of Amer­i­ca. Why, we’ve said for lo these many years that if you don’t like it here, you are free to go. Race got noth­ing to do with it, no sir. Pseu­do aca­d­e­m­ic Sebas­t­ian Gor­ka said it him­self, and Mr. Frank Pavone played the clip live on Twit­ter. (Mr. Pavone, a priest, has as much of a man crush on Gor­ka as he does on Trump.)

But who is Mr. Trump, or Mr. Gor­ka, or Mr. Pavone a priest, or you or me, to decide who loves Amer­i­ca and who hates Amer­i­ca? This is all an exceed­ing­ly fine scrim over racism. The words “go back where you came from” are racist on their face. But it is more than that. Three of the four women Mr. Trump attacked with those words are from the Unit­ed States. Ms. Oca­sio-Cortez was born in the Bronx; Ms. Tlaib was born in Detroit; Ms. Press­ley was born in Cincin­nati. But because they are brown, the pres­i­dent assumed that they must have been born else­where. They must be immi­grants, or crim­i­nal invaders, or haters of the Realm. You only get the pre­sump­tion of hav­ing been born here if you’re white.

But let’s assume, for the sake of a blog post, that Mr. Trump’s true ani­mus is against peo­ple who hate the Unit­ed States. How does he know that The Squad enter­tains any such hatred? Upon what is he bas­ing this notion? He claims that AOC has called Amer­i­cans “garbage.” That’s a lie. In fact, she described the poli­cies of mod­er­ates as “ten per­cent bet­ter than garbage.” He claims that Ms. Omar used the expres­sion “evil Jews.” That too is a lie. What she said was that the nation of Israel has done evil things.

We must tol­er­ate no spin here. Mr. Trump tells these lies about The Squad he pur­ports they hate Amer­i­ca, to scrim his racism—to point his guilty fin­ger at the inno­cent. And he tells these lies, also, to deflect from the fact that The Squad con­sists of four able crit­ics of poli­cies that he favors. That is why, for exam­ple, Trump’s apol­o­gists have fits and sweats when AOC protests the con­cen­tra­tion camps at the bor­der. She’s effec­tive. What she says has weight.

But say the spin is truth and you still are left with a notion dan­ger­ous of itself. It’s this: If a per­son protests injus­tice, it must be that he, or she, hates Amer­i­ca. I mean, you think it’s so bad here, do you? Why don’t you try liv­ing in some real hell hole, you ingrate, you Amer­i­ca-hat­ing left­ist!

Mr. Pavone, a priest, is so much more than a Trump apol­o­gist; he struts around and waves pom­poms for the sta­ble genius, and he will not be caught protest­ing any­thing, unless it’s abor­tion. Good Mr. Pavone loves Amer­i­ca, and babies. And because he loves babies, he has typed many hun­dreds of char­ac­ters on Twit­ter defend­ing the sep­a­ra­tion of chil­dren from their fam­i­lies. That’s what hap­pens when you vio­late the law, he says. (And the chil­dren at the bor­der are a very dif­fer­ent set of babies than the infi­nite­ly more pre­cious babies yet to be born.) And Good Mr. Pavone defend­ed the ICE depor­ta­tion raids because the vic­tims, he says, broke the law. (I pause here to point out that Good Mr. Pavone has blocked me on Twit­ter.)

Now, what­ev­er hap­pened to the Catholic teach­ing that an unjust law is no law at all? Mr. Pavone, a priest, ought to be famil­iar with it; Pope St. John Paul II speaks of it at some length in Evan­geli­um Vitae (1995), and in ref­er­ence to Good Mr. Pavone’s sec­ond-favorite sub­ject, abor­tion. (Praise of Trump Our Lord is his favorite sub­ject.) Has he read Evan­geli­um Vitae? Who am I to say? But here is part of what John Paul II says:

The doc­trine on the nec­es­sary con­for­mi­ty of civ­il law with the moral law is in con­ti­nu­ity with the whole tra­di­tion of the Church. … Abor­tion and euthana­sia are … crimes which no human law can claim to legit­imize. There is no oblig­a­tion in con­science to obey such laws; instead there is a grave and clear oblig­a­tion to oppose them by con­sci­en­tious objec­tion. From the very begin­nings of the Church, the apos­tolic preach­ing remind­ed Chris­tians of their duty to obey legit­i­mate­ly con­sti­tut­ed pub­lic author­i­ties (cf. Rom. 13:1–7; 1 Pet. 2:13–14), but at the same time it firm­ly warned that “we must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). [EV 72, ff.]

Dr. Mar­tin Luther King, Jr., whose niece Alve­da works with Mr. Pavone’s Priests for Life out­fit, makes the same point about our duty to break unjust laws. He writes in Let­ter from Birm­ing­ham Jail (1963): “[O]ne has a moral respon­si­bil­i­ty to dis­obey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augus­tine that ‘an unjust law is no law at all.’ ”

Dr. King derives this from St. Augus­tine. (And in terms of Amer­i­can con­sci­en­tious dis­sent, he’s in a line of descent from that vile anti-Amer­i­can Hen­ry David Thore­au.) Per­haps Mr. Pavone, a priest, has heard of St. Augus­tine. There’s some­thing of a chance he’s heard of Thore­au. But whether he has or not, he sure­ly gives no regard to them, or to St. John Paul II. And that makes his nom­i­nal schtick of protest­ing abortion—let us say incon­gru­ous. When it comes to injus­tice against immi­grants and migrants and refugees, sud­den­ly Mr. Pavone says, “I’m sor­ry, but the law.”

I would point out to Good Mr. Pavone and Mr. Gor­ka and the sta­ble genius Mr. Trump that protest­ing injus­tice is an Amer­i­can tra­di­tion. The Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence was a protest against injus­tice. Mr. Pavone, a priest, who is white hot with patri­o­tism, should know that; unless he now thinks that July 4 is about tanks. But if we are going to say that protest­ing injus­tice here means you hate Amer­i­ca and should leave, then the abo­li­tion­ists hat­ed Amer­i­ca. The suf­frag­ists should have left. JFK should have offered to pay pas­sage out of Amer­i­ca for the hate-Amer­i­ca-firsters who marched on Wash­ing­ton.

And Frank Pavone must hate Amer­i­ca, too, because he protests the injus­tice of abor­tion. He speaks with bold­ness against the set­tled law of the land. (For Mr. Gor­such and Mr. Kavanaugh have both called Roe “set­tled.”) Now, if Mr. Pavone, a priest, hates Amer­i­ca so much that he would protest set­tled law and even des­e­crate a corpse in protest, then he should tell us where he would pre­fer to live; I’ll make sure I start a GoFundMe to see that it hap­pens.