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Rosa Parks Arguments Against Civil Disobedience

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"You must never be fearful of what you are doing when it is right." Spoken elegantly in the words of a leading historical figure in Civil Disobedience, Rosa Parks perfectly captures the meaning, integrity, and even necessity of nonviolent rebellion in situations of legal and social injustice. It is not only the right, but the moral duty of the people in a free society to stand up to the law if it violates the God-given rights of its people.

If the citizens of a free society are never to protest legislation that oppresses them, how can such a society even be considered free? People of a free society have the ability and the obligation to stand up for their beliefs through nonviolent means. It is an obligation because we are conscious beings …show more content…
Carl Cohen states this clearly through his work: Arguments Against Civil Disobedience. "Persons who engage in civil disobedience deliberately flout the law; they make light of it in a way that cannot be justified in a law-governed community." In essence, organized resistance against the law weakens the power of the legislature and its ability to govern its people, such that resistance against every new law that came about would render the government completely ineffective. However, if used only in cases of true injustice, nonviolent protest actually has a positive effect on the society as a whole by giving its people the power to eliminate corrupt or oppressive …show more content…
The public figure of this movement, the infamous Martin Luther King Jr., was imprisoned in Birmingham Jail. From his cell, King wrote a famous letter outlining the four basic steps inherent within an organized effort of civil disobedience. First, King stated, the people who feel that they are oppressed must collect facts to determine that there is, in fact, an injustice being committed. If that is so, the oppressed peoples have a duty to plead their case in an attempt of negotiation with higher powers. If it is not solved, the next step is self-purification, closely followed by direct action. Through this process of peaceful bargaining, the American society was eventually changed for the better, steadily working towards equality for all

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