National Affairs: Obey or Pay

Dr. Wirt A. Warren, a mild-mannered physician with a good practice in Wichita, Kans., sat down and wrote a letter to the Department of Justice in Washington. “This will inform you,” he wrote, “that I am not obeying and do not intend to obey . . . that portion of the [Selective Service] act … providing a penalty for knowingly counseling . . . evasion of registration or service . . . The act is a law which I feel morally bound to break.”

He had deliberately advised his stepson to refuse to register, he said, and had offered him money to skip to Canada or Mexico. The stepson disregarded the advice and on his 18th birthday registered. But 40-year-old Wirt Warren, a Unitarian and a Socialist who had been drafted as a conscientious objector in World War II, was plainly inviting the U.S. to make something of it anyway.

The Government did. Dr. Warren was convicted last April by a federal jury in Wichita and sentenced to two years in prison. He appealed, arguing that he had acted within the freedom of speech and religion guaranties of the Bill of Rights.

Last week the three judges of the U.S. tenth circuit court of appeals at Omaha unanimously turned down Dr. Warren’s appeal, ruled that if the U.S. Congress has the power to raise armies—which it does—it also has “power to say who shall serve in them and in what way . . . The constitutional guaranties of personal liberty are not always absolutes . . . [Dr. Warren violated the law] under his asserted philosophy that he had a right to disobey a Federal law which he believed to be detrimental to mankind. A person may not decide to himself whether a law is good or bad and if bad, that he is free to disobey it.”