The Love of Zero Tolerance

I am in regular communication with the Catholics of my youth, one of whom is Father James Rude, a loving affable character who was the bearded priest at my Jesuit prep school during the late 70s. Fr. Rude ran the soup kitchen in downtown LA and taught social justice as one of his courses. By the time I was a senior, his social justice course ran afoul of what I expected it to be - I was horrendously upset and performed an intellectual boycott, refusing to do the work. The details escape me, but I do remember my great disappointment now that I think of him, something I haven't done in over 30 years.

At any rate, we may or may not have begun a correspondence about social justice of the sort I would have liked to have had here in the context of that as a plank for Mr. Obama. He has assigned me to read Matthew 25 which I am about to. I posed the following question:

Given that we understand great differences in the circumstances of people, how does loving one as yourself not become gratuitous charity when one has very exacting standards it is not reasonable for the object of one's love to achieve. If I never smoked a day in my life, wouldn't the love of zero tolerance be onerous to a smoker?

At the back of my mind is the question about whether or not a society of laws serves social justice and where charity and philanthropy meet morals, laws and religious dogma. It goes to the core of an exceptionalism and an expansive foreign policy - on what basis can one society judge another and on what basis in law are the 'conquered' bound to obey given that most of us can't read the law.