Extreme idealism shouldn’t be enshrined in government or law, and certainly not in a democratic government. Ideals are fine for personal guidance. They’re even acceptable as governmental goals, but they become tyranny when turned into unyielding law.

Take abortion. Any policy that forbids abortion is going to kill a certain and not inconsequential number of mothers, as is already happening in Texas, and any policy that allows even restricted abortion to save the life of the mother will kill a certain number of viable fetuses. It also forces doctors to choose between disobeying the law or seeing women die unnecessarily. Why? Because extremist and absolutist laws can’t take into account all the possible health permutations possible.

Or take immigration. The current ICE policies, combined with the legal fallacy that immigration is a civil offense, effectively make no distinction in terms of guilt between someone trying to escape being killed by a dictator in their former homeland and someone who’s committed multiple crimes. They also punish infants and children who had no choice about where they were born or where they live. But then, why should one expect any more of the descendants of people who wiped out millions of indigenous peoples and enslaved millions of others for hundreds of years, who also just conveniently forgot that they are the descendants, essentially, of illegal immigrants?

And some of those who support ICE actions and policies even profess to believe in a God, whose professed Savior said, “Suffer the little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me.” And one of those supporters is even a pastor, whose professed savior didn’t say, “just the children whose preferably white parents were born here.”

Then, of course, there’s the problem of selective enforcement of absolutist laws. We’re seeing ICE agents picking up U.S. citizens because they “look different.” Add to that an administration that changes the law, without the approval of Congress, so that immigrants who were here legally became illegal overnight, and not because of anything they did, while ICE unilaterally decides that agents don’t need judicial warrants to break into homes.

But apparently that legal absolutism being applied to pregnant women and once-legal immigrants doesn’t apply to white male sexual abusers or well-connected drug dealers or white politicians convicted of financial fraud.

Fancy that.