Obey, honor and sustain the law, but which one?

"Obey, honor and sustain the law." I vote for that. I obey all laws of physics to the best of my ability. I have never once broken the law of gravity. I did get some air once driving a bit fast, but I eventually came back to earth with a thud.

My family sustains the Scout Law. I'm an Eagle Scout, as are all my five boys, thanks to their mother. The confusion comes trying to remember the difference between the oath, being prepared or the amendment about a Scout is hungry. I get started on one of them, and end up with "being true, chaste and benevolent."

There are rules in biology and board games. I cheat there sometimes. Daily I defy Mendel's laws of inheritance. I have a gene that makes too much cholesterol, but I refused to have a heart attack in my 40s. So I intentionally take a statin drug that inhibits the synthesis of cholesterol. It is my sit-down strike against a law of nature.

Not that I support outright anarchy, but I have broken the law more times than I should admit in public. I haven't robbed a bank, cheated on taxes, or burglarized the neighborhood. However, every day, especially if I'm late, I speed to work. Before you turn me in to the authorities, in my defense, I am driving with the flow of traffic.

So I'm zooming along with all my fellow conspirators breaking the law of the land. I suppose while we are at it we are not honoring or sustaining it either. We are not an organized mass protest; we are not a gang. We will most happily pull over and say thank you to the police officer after he or she hands us our ticket. Nonetheless, while the law says 65, we race a smidgen above.

Not wanting to be a total traffic reprobate, to redeem myself, I am working on coming to a complete stop, and I do wear my seat belt. School zones for me are holy grounds, so I even drive under the posted flashing limits.

Still, there are some laws that I don't honor or sustain. As a child, driving through the South, I drank from the white-only drinking fountain and skipped the gas station bathrooms for coloreds. Now looking back, I wish I had been old enough to understand the Jim Crow laws and had sipped the water from the segregated spigot.

There are present-day examples of unfair laws, perhaps not so egregious, but they still propagate inequality. Like all of you, I pay my taxes like any law-abiding citizen. Still, I find it interesting that some large law-abiding corporations don't. They are individuals by law. But apparently the laws they obey are different than for ordinary folks.