Civil Disobedience In A Free Society

The US. was founded on the concept that man enjoyed God-given rights and freedoms which were unalienable. At the core of the nation's self-proclaimed freedom was the ideal that free men could be governed by a democratic government owned by themselves, and dedicated, at the bequest of the people, to the preservation of one's life and property. The framework for the fledgling republic was the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Laws were enacted by representatives, and those laws are the foundation for all societal interactions between a free people, including all civil rights, and business rights. Given these freedoms, and the genius of a government that was predicated on human rights, human freedom and in particular, and governed
Further, the act of civil disobedience is used by special interests to undermine the legitimate government. For example it was reported in the papers that a group of black-masked pro-Syrian "protesters" in Berkeley beat an innocent man bloody to "protest" our President's immigration policies. In Letter Written from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King, Jr. states that there are both just and unjust laws, and argues that he is not responsible for following unjust laws. King's theory, while based in a legitimate concern for an injustice, is flawed, in that it encourages the citizenry to ignore the law. In his defense of his own civil disobedience, King cites Thomas Aquinas and states that Aquinas supported the concept of disobedience in the face of an unjust law. Many authors criticized King's position at the time, including law professor Richard R. Molleur, of Georgetown University. In his article, "A House Divided Against Itself: The Threat of Contemporary Civil Disobedience to the American Legal System" Molleur argues that King's reliance on Aquinas in Letter is misplaced and a departure from the teachings of