"Minority Rule"

[Dill]

(06-06-2021, 05:16 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: So, I feel like jumping in just because I'm bored. Refusal to adhere to a law is not, in itself, the basis behind civil disobedience. Civil disobedience, according to any definition I have seen, requires a public display of that refusal and a willingness to accept the punishment from the state. I think this page from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy provides the best and most thorough discussion on the topic that is accessible for the lay-reader. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/civil-disobedience/

Yes. The problem faced by the civil disobedient violating a law deemed unjust is that authority will, in the first place, view any such violation as just criminal. (I am guessing you may have experience with this.) Citizens don't have the right to decide, unilaterally, which laws are just and which not, which they will obey and which not. 

Further, if the disobedient claims to be upholding the spirit of the law, creating pressure for new/better law, there is in that an implied claim that people should obey the law.  But here the disobedient is breaking it. A double standard. "You all obey the law but I don't have to." 

So the practice of civil disobedience evolved to meet these obstacles/objections, in the U.S. especially, but also in Western Europe. Obviously you have to get the authorities' attention to get laws changed. And you go to jail because you respect the law. You break it but obey it in the break by taking the punishment.  You create and work in a grey area, intended to be temporary.

In the U.S. our authorities and civil societies luckily understand this form of protest better than in some other countries. 

I remember back in the early '80s when Germans were protesting the placement there of U.S. Pershing missiles, which they felt made them a target. Elderly grandmothers involved in a sit in were arrested in one case. To my horror, a German judge wanted to throw the book at them because, as he explained it, "We did not respect rule of law deeply enough during the 3rd Reich." That citizens were willing to break a law and accept punishment for doing so, did not, to his mind, raise any questions about the law itself. No give and take between people and government, because we don't want a 4th Reich? (This attitude is, I guess, the anti-thesis to that constitutional fundamentalism which can authorize a group of militia to assault a state governor's mansion, try, and hang the governor in a "people's court.")