This action, known more popularly as civil disobedience, has been throughout the history of our nation an important method of change towards a more …show more content…
just and free society. However, from the beginning of our nation, what has been defined as civil disobedience and what is defined as violence, riots, disturbing the peace or outright rebellion has been hotly debated.
One of the first cases of this happened almost instantly as the nation was born. Starting in Western Pennsylvania, the Whiskey Rebellion was one of the first outright opposition to US laws, and some could say that removing the judges and tax collectors who enforced what was seen as an unfair tax act may have been the first American act of civil disobedience. As the name suggests, the rebellion was quickly violent, seizing weapons and arming themselves against the US Government. George Washington, marched to Pennsylvania with his army to quickly put down this rebellion, as he believed that if some people could choose to follow the law only when it suited them, that laws had no meaning, and so, the government must enforce all laws (Mirkin). This is the key in the argument against civil disobedience, that if the law is only selectively applied and enforced, then it is no longer a law. Protest against a law does not have to be synonymous with disobeying that law. Due to this fact, in order to practice proper civil disobedience …show more content…
that is beneficial to this nation, people must be willing to accept the consequences of the government enforcing the laws, as the government should (Goldwin). The other case against civil disobedience is that in this nation, there already is a process to fight laws that are perceived as unjust and/or unconstitutional and that is our robust court system. Fighting a law in court is very different from deliberately disobeying that law in order to show its unjust. The ability to fight a law in a legal manner is very important in a just and free society, and fortunately our court system gives that to us.
The case against civil disobedience is one rooted generally in theory, while the case for action is one that is based on the reality of the history of our nation, a nation in which at times, not only the laws, but the entire society has been unjust and unfree.
The most popular examples of civil disobedience all come from the civil rights movement of the 1960’s and for good reason. The entire movement was designed around civil disobedience and its leader, Martin Luther King Jr, is famed for his use of the tactic to bring awareness and action to the segregated south. Martin Luther King was famed for his advocacy and action in using non-violent protest and civil disobedience to spread freedom in the southern United States (Frankel). This civil disobedience clearly was pivotal in bringing both public attention and pressure but also bringing it to the forefront of the government's mind and cumulating in the civil right bill of 1964. One of the best theories of civil disobedience comes from Henry David Thoreau who argued that the movement from absolute monarchy and government, to limited monarchy, to democracy was a series of steps in the movement towards pure respect for the individual, and that by the idea of consent of the governed, the government must respect each and every individual (Thoreau). In Thoreau’s mind, civil disobedience was just a movement along those steps in order to get the government to recognise and individuals right to govern themselves and create a purely
individual society.
While the theory against civil disobedience makes a lot of sense, and the theory for it may not be as convincing to some, the practical history of our nation is one of civil disobedience and in order to continue to promote the American brand of free society, justice to laws must be respected and understood as a net positive to the overall growth of our society.