Certainly, Americans are no strangers to lawbreaking. What else was our revolution but a rebellion to overthrow the centuries-old rule and law of king and Parliament, and establish our own?
The Oklahoma Supreme Court, in a 7-2 decision, has ordered a monument of the Ten Commandments removed from the Capitol. Calling the Commandments "religious in nature and an integral part of the Jewish and Christian faiths," the court said the monument must go.
Gov. Mary Fallin has refused. And Oklahoma lawmakers instead have filed legislation to let voters cut out of their constitution the specific article the justices invoked. Some legislators want the justices impeached.
Fallin's action seems a harbinger of what is to come in America — an era of civil disobedience like the 1960s, where court orders are defied and laws ignored in the name of conscience and a higher law.
Only this time, the rebellion is likely to arise from the right.
Certainly, Americans are no strangers to lawbreaking. What else was our revolution but a rebellion to overthrow the centuries-old rule and law of king and Parliament, and establish our own?
U.S. Supreme Court decisions have been defied, and those who defied them lionized by modernity. Thomas Jefferson freed all imprisoned under the sedition act, including those convicted in court trials presided over by Supreme Court justices. Jefferson then declared the law dead.
Some Americans want to replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill with Harriet Tubman, who, defying the Dred Scott decision and fugitive slave acts, led slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad.
New England abolitionists backed the anti-slavery fanatic John Brown, who conducted the raid on Harpers Ferry that got him hanged but helped to precipitate a Civil War. That war was fought over whether 11 Southern states had the same right to break free of Mr. Lincoln's Union as the 13 colonies did to break free of George III's England.
Millions of Americans, with untroubled consciences, defied the Volstead Act, imbibed alcohol and brought an end to Prohibition.
In the civil rights era, defying laws mandating segregation and ignoring court orders banning demonstrations became badges of honor.
Rosa Parks is a heroine because she refused to give up her seat on a Birmingham bus, despite the laws segregating public transit that relegated blacks to the "back of the bus."
In "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Dr. King, defending civil disobedience, cited Augustine — "an unjust law is no law at all" — and Aquinas who defined an unjust law as "a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law."
Said King, "one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws."
But who decides what is an "unjust law"?
If, for example, one believes that abortion is the killing of an unborn child and same-sex marriage is an abomination that violates "eternal law and natural law," do those who believe this not have a moral right if not a "moral responsibility to disobey such laws"?
